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“The Political BooK of tlje Hour.” 


East, 

West,m 

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**THE POLITICAL ALLIANCE?” 


By T. C. DeLE(^^;;,f;^ 
( OCT 12 ’8% 

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"'The Prose Epic of the Bloody Confederate JJrama.^' 


FOUR YEARS IN REBEL CAPITALS 

Af) Inside View of Social Life in the Confederacy from 
_ Birth to Death; from Original Notes n)ade 
froti) 1861 to 1865. 

BY X. C. Del^EON. 


Au/.hor's Autograph Edition, with Prefatory Sketch by L. de V. 
Chaudron ; Autographed Portrait of the Author 
and a Useful Appendix. 


386 Large Pages; Fine Paper; Cloth, Gilt, $1,50, 


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Copyrighteil, 1896, by T. C. DeLeon. 






A CONSIDERATION OF THEIR MUTUAL USEFULNESS 
AND MUTUAL DEPENDENCE, PROVING THAT 
THERE IS NO POLITICAL ALLIANCE. 

By X. C.^DeLEON, 


Author of “Four Years in Rebel Capitals,” “The Keiidiug of the 
Solid South,” “ The Puritan’s Daughter,” etc. 



“You can’t fool all the people, all the time.” 

[Abraham lAncoln. 

“ When only the ledger lives, and only not all men lie! ” 

[Alfred Tennyson* 


MOBILE, ALA., 

THE GOSSIP PRINTING CO. 

1896. 


















TK2.3I7 

1 


INDEX TO CHAPTERS. 

- Page 


I. Roasting Flapdoodle:— The Stale Husks prof¬ 
fered to the patient Steers of Labor. 5 

II. Nailing the Lie :—That alleged “Alliance” 

between West and South considered. 9 

III. The Real Issue A Government for the Peo¬ 
ple, or a Syndicate for a Class ?.... 15 


IV. At The Auction Block:—W hy Mark’s Millions 

cannot “ Knock Down ” the Popular Vote.. 20 
V. The Tail of the Dog:— The Attitude of the 

South towards the East, past and present.. 25 
VI. The Old South:— Her Theories and her 

Practice. 32 

VII. Reconstruction :—What it did for the South 

and Both Other Sections. 37 

VIII. “The New South”:— A Name and Nothing 

Else. 43 

IX. The Vermiform Appendix:- The Real Popu¬ 


list Party and Tom Watson's Needlessness. 49 
X. The Natural Alliance :—What the South 

has Really offered the West. 57 

XI. The East in the South :—Cold Facts about 

the “Gratitude” of Sections. 63 

XII. The British Octopus :—How its Tentacles 

have squeezed Millions out of America. 70 

XIII. At The Phantom Party:— The Gruesome 

Dance of the Dead Democra^<^^".T..75 


XIV. Tories and Hessians :—Which have the Best 

of the Bargain and of the Moral Result? . 81 

PICTUEES OF CANDIDATES. 


William Jennings Bryan . Frontisjnece 

William McKinley . Facing page 36 

Arthur Sewall . ‘‘ 50 

Garrett A. Hohart . “ 70 

















I —ROASTING FLAPDOODLE, 

For every inch that is not fool is rogue. 

[John Dry den. 

The world moves. 

He who does not move with it is liable to—fall off. 

Conditions of day-before-yesterday will rarely solve 
problems for day-after-tomorrow. 

The Fathers of the Constitution were “wise in their 
generation.” 

It is neither irreverent, nor illogical, to consider 
whether they—with dicta and methods unchanged by the 
march of time—would be esteemed wise leaders, in this 
generation. 

Yet the flat and stale pretense of argument is thrust 
upon live and thinking men to-day, that they are depart¬ 
ing from the precepts of yesterday, inculcated by the 
Fathers. 

And the men who offer these pretended arguments are 
far from fools. Their chiefest mistake is that they take 
the American masses for fools; offering them—when they 
ask bread -unprofitable crumbs of flapdoodle. 

The best authorities define for us that: “ Flapdoodle 
is the food that fools are fed upon.” But, even for such 
use as pabulum, it should be fresh, not mouldy. Else the 
public stomach will never take it in. 

Venerating the Fathers for the legacy they have left 
us, no man believes that the study of, and adherence to, 
that legacy alone could solve a single one of the living and 
vital issues of to-day. Legacies, venerated however they 
may be, rapidly grow out of date, and are hidden under 
the dust of “innocuous desuetude.” Architecture, mixed- 
drinks, furniture, bathing-costumes, books and marital- 
relations vary with rapidity that proves this truth. 


6 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


Could Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and 
Jackson hold a planchette caucus to-day in some tenth- 
story office, they would be too dazed by the rush of the 
elevator to advise as to the keeping up of the gold reserve, 
or the burial of the dead from Indianapolis. 

The problems of coinage, tariff and honest elections 
may justly be taken as more important—as well as vastly 
more intricate—in this year of Grace, or disgrace, 1896, 
than the naming of parties, or the issuance of ‘‘fiat” 
money in the year 1806. Tenfold productive area and 
twentyfold population cannot be relegated to the theories 
of the Fathers, let parties fall I 

And this trends to the query as to parties to-day : 
“Where are they—at? ” Only the answer is too many 
sided and too involved for the limits of a pamphlet—or a 
volume. 

It .only needs for any thinking creature to recall the 
origin of the Federalist and Whig factions of yore; the 
growth of democracy, under one or another name, to op¬ 
pose whiggery, and the splitting of that close ante helium 
into one of those abolition and pro-slavery elements, 
whence sprang the war ; and the birth of misnamed re¬ 
publicanism, out of both and the old whig ideas, close sue 
ceeding the war. 

Thinking thus, he will prove to himself how the two 
great parties have drifted from those moorings to which 
their shrewd owners first lashed them. He will see how 
republicanism has veered with the current of popular 
thought, and has dragged her anchor close to the old dem¬ 
ocratic wharf; how democracy has pulled up-stream, and 
has thrown her hawser close around the John Sherman 
post. He will note that the flags of both have been so 
weather-beaten, patched and re-broidered that none 
may read them without a glass—or two; that the very 
names upon their sterns are well-nigh obliterated by bump¬ 
ing and storm-stress. 

No man denies that party ties have been loosened ; 
that party charts have been strangely re-traced, and with 


ROASTING FLAPDOODLE. 


7 


borrowed lines. It is patent that party names and party 
cries have lost their meaning to the ears of a new genera¬ 
tion. Why ? Because out of its dire necessites for life- 
out of the unbearable load piled upon it, alternately by 
one or the other party—that generation has at last begun 
to think for itself ! 

Thinking for its life, it has learned the living truth 
that the cry of allegiance to party—when that party will 
sacrifice actual fact and logical condition for fatuous ad¬ 
hesion to disproved and fatal theory—is mere flapdoodle. 

The American masses are not the fools to be fed upon 
it, when they ask for simple bread. Those masses are ear¬ 
nest, patient, long suffering. They have pulled the plough 
of their political drivers through tough glebe and heavy 
furrow, lo ! these years, without protest, or kick. 

But it is too much to ask these mute, driven steers of 
labor to fasten still heavier yoke upon their own necks, 
once they have learned their own strength ; have learned 
that one flirt of that neck will send the yoke into the face 
of the driver, sprawling him prone. 

It is flapdoodle—impure and very simple—to attempt 
to prod the working man of this Union, to-day, back into 
voluntary submission of neck, with so dull and rusted a 
goad as the theory of party fealty. It must first be sharp¬ 
ened with the emery of proof as to what party is. 

The steer of labor has done his ruminating. He has 
turned on the goad and is kicking against the pricks, 
come from which side they may. He is doing the driving 
himself, and is showing his heels very viciously. He has 
turned in the West and rent republicanism. He has turn¬ 
ed in the South and battered her vaunted solidity out 
of recognition. He is turning in the East, to trample 
with strong hoof class legislation and money domination. 
Plainly he cares no tittle whether the goad touches him 
from North or East, from West or South. He kicks 
against the pricks, and tramps doggedly on toward the 
newer pastures that promise fresh provender. 

The grass on all the old pastures has been nibbled 




8 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


close. It is cropped too short for tooth-hold, even where 
not trampled into bare and arid dirt. The steer must eat, 
if he haul. He sees the feeding ground of yesterday all 
inadequate to sustain life; and instinct drives him—as the 
goad cannot—to seek any change that hints of fresh, nu¬ 
tritious grass. 

Offer him the stale husks of doctrine, the thrice-sifted 
chaff of party pride, the juiceless hulls of dry dogma, and 
he turns away his patient nose. Steam them with theory, 
flavor them with savory promises; through the whole 
mash he scents flapdoodle. 

And this political flapdoodle, offered the popular beast 
of burden to-day for his sole sustenance, is largely made 
up of chestnuts. But even the chestnuts are raw. They 
are wormy, all through. There is no health and no hope 
in the mash. 

American common sense will roast the chestnuts for 
the party cooks. 





U.—^AlU^G THE LIE. 

Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou Idar of the first 
magnitude! [William Congreve. 

A miracle maker is ofttimes a liar; but few liars 
are miracle makers. 

The political party, without its campaign lie, would 
go into the history of miracles—or museum freaks. 

The campaign lie based upon the impossible is ever a 
boomerang. Peculiarly such is the stock pretense, rubbed 
to very baldness by iteration, tliat the South and the West 
havemjide a political alliance this year, to ruin the trade 
of the East with either, or both, by “the election of a 
populist, masquerading as the democratic standard 
bearer.” 

The utterer of this poor i)arody upon Mendez Pinto 
lacks that first essential of the successful liar, a good mem¬ 
ory. He forgets that other people have memories, what¬ 
ever his own may be. 

ffe had only to recall the recent and familiar record 
of the Chicago convention, every precedent act that led 
up to its result, and all subsequent happenings—either 
among the people, or in the press—to avoid the issue of 
such spurious charge. It must show up as a greasy pew¬ 
ter counterfeit, even to the most inexpert touch. 

He had only to recall the St. Louis republican conven¬ 
tion, and its populist successor in the same city, to learn 
that at neither of the three were the South and the West 
in even suspicious vicinage to collusion : that they acted 
not only separately, but frequently in opposition. 

The South went to Chicago dissevered and uncertain. 
Here several states had different preferences for the presi- 




10 EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 

dency. They were united on but one point, the free coin¬ 
age of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1, without deference to 
the action of any foreign power soever. This alone would 
disprove wholly any story of even political pact, or com¬ 
bine; and all the voting, on doctrinal questions there, 
shows that so far from being the hand-maiden of the West, 
the South scattered on different candidates; one of them 
being from New England. 

At St. Louis it was the South, combining with the 
East that gave McKinley his walk-over nomination. This 
same writer pointed out, just after that convention, that 
Hanna’s man was the logical negro candidate, and that 
the South would, and must, rally to any man nominated 
at Chicago, as the logical candidate of the white race. 

It matters not that the negroes, and the negro-elected 
delegates at St. Louis, represented nothing at home; that, 
far from carrying a single state, they were not able to 
carry one single county in all the South. It argues noth¬ 
ing that they were making a trade of impossible electoral 
votes for possible offices; knowing that they could not 
deliver the goods in one single instance. The fact remains 
that William McKinley was the unanimous choice of the 
black-and-tan republican vote of the South at that con¬ 
vention ; making him the logical negro candidate and 
disproving the existence of any compact, even there, be¬ 
tween the West and South. 

Even after the thrilling words of Bryan had gone to 
the brains, and thence flashed to the hearts, of the men 
before him at Chicago—warming them like rich wine and 
drawing all to support of the predestined leader—the South 
pondered and argued with herself. Many conservative 
men paused; many old time, true democrats asked for 
time; and the majority of her press either openly rebelled 
against the unanimous flat of their party’s will, or hung 
upon the fence to air the mouldiness out of them. The 
sudden and unexpected nomination literally dazed the 
.slow-thinking leaders of the South. They came to its full 
realization but gradually; yet all the more steadfast 


NAILING THE LIE. 


11 


and unanimous because of their thought-born decision. 
Does this savor of collusion, pact, or pre-arrangement? 
Had there been either of these, it must have been made 
by, or hinted to, somebody; and to none surely but the 
delegated spokesmen of the South in that convention. 
It would surely have been no surprise to the press; for it 
must have been hinted beforehand, not only at home, but 
North, East and West, by the subsidized organs of the 
gold clique. It was only their mendacious after thought. 

But those Southern delegates themselves—who had 
gone to nominate Boies, or Bland, or Russell, or a “dark 
horse’’—anybody, but unmentioned Bryan—came home 
dazed at their own resistless swirl to the inevitable. They 
were brimming with hope and enthusiasm ; but they could 
not explain the rationale of their own result. Even the 
rear-back opposition press discussed every aspect of their 
disappointment, save only the impossible one of prear¬ 
rangement, or compact, until its sudden and rheumatic 
wafting to them on the East wind. 

What voters, electors, editors and reporters had never 
hinted, could never possibly have had existence. The 
South has never been too imitative of the progressive, but 
one thing she has learned from her “hustling” Eastern 
and Western sisters. What any man does, says or even 
thinks—often what he does not do, say or think—gets into 
her papers. And there was never hint, or suggestion, 
that the South was going to Chicago, went, and came 
back, to do aught but express her own will on a question 
that concerned her, at least equally with her sister auton¬ 
omies in the Union of the States. 

But the South was a unit for Silver ? Verily; and for 
reasons plain and explicable to all men, even if not set 
forth later in these pages. But she was for silver—and 
had so spoken distinctly—long before the majority of the 
Western states she met at Chicago. 

So much for the conventions. But it is a plain truth 
of national business history that the South had sought, 
for thirty years, to make an alliance with the West. It 



U EAS1\ WEST AND SOUTH. 

was a simple business and commercial alliance, mutual in 
result and indicated as natural and needful by the map. 

But the West had, in all those years, presistently 
turned down the South. She had been left to her own de¬ 
vices, even in the face of the fact that God and nature had 
given these two sections unexampled facilities for mutual 
usefulness; that each was materially and commercially 
essential to the other for any perfected and far-reaching 
permanence of result. 

It must be clear to the dullest comprehension that 
two sections which, after years of effort, could not com¬ 
bine on a question of mutual gain, could never have allied 
on a question of sentiment, and formed a political trust, 
in the course of a single campaign ! 

On the other hand the East—whether from motives 
of interest need not be discussed—had proved, early post 
helium, the ally of southern progress. The South, like 
her sisters, has a face with a nose upon it. There is small 
likelihood that she would have spited that face by cutting 
off its nose, with deliberation and forethought—and for 
what? To nominate a candidate, whose name had never 
been whispered as a presidential possibility, until it thun¬ 
dered itself into the hearts and brains of all who caught 
the echo of his clarion tones in appeal for what was in 
those hearts and brains. 

But beyond the proof of facts, reasonableness and 
common sense, the printed proofs speak as well. If 
there existed any ultra sentimental feeling for the West, 
in the South, either sectional or political, its press does 
not speak it. The very morning after Bryan’s nomina¬ 
tion, the “Mobile Register—” the oldest democratic 
paper in Alabama, and which arrogates to itself party 
spokesmanship—said editorially: 

“Our ties of business and of friendship have always 
been with the Eastern people. We are related to them 
by blood; we know them, and they know us. On the 
other hand, these Western people have not forgiven us for 
going into the war, and they never will. They are as 


NAILING THE LIE. 


13 


prejudiced against us, as fixed in their condemnation of 
what they call ‘ the wicked rebellion,’ as they were when 
they came to the ‘ call of one hundred tliousand more ’, 
in 1864, to crush us to earth and to lay waste Georgia with 
Are and sword. 

“As for business, we have no business with them, 
except to buy corn, flour and meat from them, and we are 
doing our best to do without the meat. * * * If any one 
is disposed to doubt this, let him study the history of the 
recent effort to upset a trade alliance between the South 
and the East by the establishment of a Cotton States 
Exposition at Chicago. Chicago did her part, but the 
Southern people did not want it. They froze the scheme 
to death with their absolute indifference.” 

Illogical and misstated as are these words, they show 
the animus; and it is safe to say that had there existed 
any such alliance—the paper would not have printed them. 
It is proper to add that I promptly answered the business 
errors and misstatements of the editorial; but not witli 
any suggestion, or idea, that the dreaded “alliance” had 
any possible germ in remote fact. 

Again, in its number next succeeding the Chicago 
nominations, the strictly business and industrial maga 
zine of Atlanta went into politics, for the first—and it is 
to be hoped the last—time. Leaving mills, machinery 
and foundries, it devoted its leader to a fierce, if sopho- 
moric, diatribe against the West, the candidates, and 
especially Governor Altgeld. What one could gather 
from this peculiar, and plainly experimental, departure 
was that the West was the foe of Southern progress; the 
East its almoner, and the Governor of Illinois an “anar¬ 
chist.” Non-industrial themes these; but they were 
made the basis—by an industrial magazine in a Southern 
democratic stronghold—for a loud and foaming defence 
of protection, as an anti-Western panacea. This again, 
while possibly weaker and more meaningless than the 
preceding extract, shows by its animus that there was 





u EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 

neither existence of a Southern combine with the West, 
nor belief in it among our people. Both newspaper and 
magazine look to their local sentiment. 

And yet the ready campaign liar arises in his weak¬ 
ness, and coolly invites reasoning creatures, the land over, 
to film their brains with the tenuous yarns he spins in 
that vacant “^devil’s workshop,” where his own brains 
ought to be. To every such legal heritor of the mantle of 
Ananias—self-condemned by his own utterance—judicial 
Charity may say: 

“And may the Lord have mercy on what soul you 
have!” 




III.—THE REAL ISSUE. 

Put money in thy purse. 

I Othello. 

In plain, honest English, this is a pocket campaign. 

That pseudo-philosopher, who said that the road to 
the heart was through the stomach, was not “up to date.” 

lie wrote of man in his crude state; “the naked, raw 
material.” But since man wore clothes, it has been an 
accepted axiom that the road to the heart is through the 
pocket. 

The plain issue—practically the only issue—of the 
present presidential campaign is through the pockets of 
the two classes. It is not between East and West, or 
South and East, or either of them combined against the 
third. It is not even between parties. 

It is between the people and their task-masters ; 
between the children of a race who inherited their free¬ 
dom—and their right to make their bread in the sweat of 
their own faces, after these were won by the blood of 
their forefathers—and the arrogant usurpers of that right. 

The real issue is made up—plain, clear cut and 
irreversible—between the owners of that birthright and 
those smooth fllchers of it, who would sell it for their bare 
commission on a mess of pottage. 

Having made nothing but a mess, to date, it yet 
remains for proof whether they get the pottage to sell. 

The money changers whom Christ drove from the 
Temple were not so greedy and relentless as this Ameri¬ 
can clique who mimics them to-day. Compared with their 
prototypes, these moderns show up meaner and more des¬ 
picable. The biblical usurers were trading on what was 
their own ; their latter day legatees trade on what is every 





16 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


man’s—save their own. They will sell what concience and 
soul they possess, and with it the bodies, blood and souls 
of their neighbors—to foreign taskmakers, for a—percent¬ 
age ! They'Stand ready to render up to aliens—if they 
only can—all the fruits of the labor, the products and the 
industry of a whole people, born free and testifying their 
rights to freedom by a century of sacrifice, manhood and 
progress, unexampled. 

It is against this class of gold-bees—hived in Wall 
street, and with their “ guns ” in every branching com¬ 
bine and hollow trust in the land—representing nothing 
but their own greed and the avarice of alien masters— 
that the masses of the people have made their issue for 
life or death. 

With these masses—in North, and East, and West 
alike the South has made her only alliance; its only secret, 
honest government and honest money ! 

It is against these misrepresentatives of them—not 
against the people of the East—that the people of the 
West and South make open war do-day. And it is war for 
honest manhood and honest money—that “ blesseth him 
that gives, and him that takes;” money for poor and rich 
alike, that keeps within its ring some “quality of mercy” 
for the toil that makes all money possible. 

In such a war for plain rights of all, the South has not 
asked—for she does not need—pact, alliance, or combine 
with any section. Once already she has sought the arbi¬ 
trament of the sword—for an idea. To-day she seeks the 
arbitrament of reason, justice and honesty—for a fact:— 
for the very existence of the household and of the right 
to live! 

As surely as He drove forth the money changers of 
yore, the men of the East and West and South, who be¬ 
lieve in His example, vrill drive the modern moneychangers 
from the portico they deflle. They will do this not as 
sections, but as free, unbought men; asking no alliance- 
needing none—in the vivid prompting of nature’s tirst 
law, self-preservation. 


THE BEAL ISSUE. 


17 


The real issue cannot be shirked. It is the one of the 
masses against the classes; a “dread and dangerous issue”— 
in its failure only; and one that has been forced upon the 
masses by the money tricksters of Wall street, and their 
miserable dupes—or worse—who have essayed filching the 
democratic mask to serve Mark Hanna in. 

Tom-toms and stink-pots may appal the Chinese. 
American freemen are not to be stunned by the hrutumful- 
meaof dictation, iterated never so loudly. They cannot be 
“shanghaied,” and shipped under a foreign Hag, to fight 
against their own blood—which “ is thicker than water.” 
They may hold their noses in presence of most loathsome 
combinations, with one hand; but they will tramp boldly 
forward, until they have put in the ballot, with the other. 

The spectacle of Mark Hanna’s gross bulk, sprawling 
about the tables of the multi-millionaires, but raises the 
gorge of the very class it is meant to overaw^e. Its servile 
record in a venal press serves only as the Spartan’s exhibi¬ 
tion of the more respectable, because drunken. Helot. 
The plain masses, who make up this nation, have only dis¬ 
gust and wrath for the man and his methods. They will 
emphasize both with their majorities next November. 

Is it in the South and in the West only that this dis¬ 
gust is felt ? Unless Boston and New York, Philadelphia 
and Baltimore, and lesser cities of the East, have all gone 
delirious with imported yellow fever, verily not. Unless 
the plain sense and rough dignity of the farmers and ar¬ 
tisans of the East have been smeared to a very dirty yel¬ 
low by the Wall street brush, they must view the sicken¬ 
ing spectacle much as the Roman plebs viewed the 
more decent orgies of the decadence. 

But it is the greasy master of Mark’s man who has 
made—who is forcing—the class issue. It is not the “ al¬ 
lied masses” of the West and South who made it—or who 
fear it. 

When that hireling Hessian, Bourke Cockran, outran 
the bidding of his purchaser and ranted fustian about his 
betters in both sections, the combine that pitted the mass- 



IS 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


es against the classes was not a Western and Southern 
one. It was the alliance of imported gold and re-import¬ 
ed brass. From first to last the real issue of this cam¬ 
paign has been made for the people,—not by the people. 
It has been made by the one small class pitting itself 
against all other classes, great and small, all the land 
over. 

“ The populist agitators of the West” and “ the un¬ 
reconciled slave-owners of the South ” have heard the 
message sent them, through his mouthpiece, by the mute 
Memnon, at Canton. They will answer it in November. 

Distinctly is there no issue of labor against capital in 
this campaign. Honest labor is fighting for honest gov¬ 
ernment, side by side with honest capital. It makes no 
plaint against productive capital; but rallies to keep it 
helpful, by helping its own power to advantage by that 
very product. 

The real issue is of idle capital against labor; its idle 
holders seeking to tighten their grip upon the throat of 
industry, that their practiced fingers may quite empty 
its already depleted pockets. 

For its own interest, labor stands allied with the 
agricultural masses. South, West and East, to add to the 
productive and distributing results of capital invested for 
honest purpose. This is the much sung ‘Hinarchism 
the pretended dreaded “communism”—of which hired 
demagogues prate in press and stump. 

Skilled, agricultural and mining labor ^re allied with 
'modest, honest and productive capital. One, and singu¬ 
lar they oppose—each of his own motion—for very exist¬ 
ence—without aught of pact or combine, and without 
remote need for either—Vampire Capital. That is the 
idle, hoarded, ever-growing capital that is used only to 
suck the yellow blood of the sleeping American treasury 
and send it into bloated foreign arteries. 

That is the real issue; the issue of American labor 
and American product for American producers; not for 
foreign gain. Minor issues there be in this campaign, 


THE HEAL ISSUE. 


19 


which in any other would tower in • significance. Beside 
the real issue of National life, or death by starvation, 
they sink into nothingness. That is made up and thrust 
upon the people. It is fixed and unalterable—beyond the 
power of change—until the sun of that November day 
goes down upon its Austerlitz of the ballot. 

Or, will it prove its Waterloo? 

Until that hour the real issue—the one issue—is the 
God-given right of the people of this Union to use their 
own that they toil for, against the right of a privileged 
class to use it for aliens. 

Condensed into a nutshell the issue is: 

Shall our country be governed by a government, or 
ruled by a syndicate? 





IV.—AT THE AUCTION BLOCK 


A. cutpurse of the empire and the rule ! 

\ Hamlet. 

Going ! Going ! Gone ! 

“What am I offered for a tine presidential chair, good 
as new and twice as easy?—Only twenty millions !—Hear 
I no more ?—Going at twenty millions !” 

A tine spectacle do Mark Hanna’s man’s master and 
his Anglo-mortgage allies present to those very foreign 
nations whose subserviencies they boast themselves to be I 
Shamelessly they proclaim that the chief magistracy of 
this Union is on the auction block, to be knocked down to 
the highest bidder; that they can buy it—if they raise 
only money enough. And hearing the voice of the crier, 
conning the advertised bids, men of known names—who 
have been enriched and elevated to place by their people 
—prate about “party honor,” even while they crowd about 
the vulgar auctioneer. 

No man doubts the will of the republican Boss—if he 
can only find the means—to emulate the philosophy of 
Artemus Ward, who “ would sacrifice the last of his wife’s 
relations in the cause of his country,” The oily Hanna is 
ambitious to sacrifice the very last gob of “ fat ” he can 
succeed in “trying’’out of the bond-traders, the trusts 
and the British agents, in the cause of his padlocked man. 

Verily the fear-bred combine of the “anarchist agri¬ 
culturists of the West,” made with “the unreconciled 
slave owners of the South,” is the dazzling white of politi¬ 
cal purity, as compared with this advertised auction of 
votes. Mark Hanna boasts that he will have money 
galore to buy the presidency for William McKinley, the 
tariff tinker whom her “anarchists” and agriculturalists 


AT THE AUCTION BLOCK. 


21 


made governor of Ohio : He keeps tally and flaunts liis 
—more or less accurate—lists of multimillionaire bidders 
in the face of national honesty. McKinley “preferred 
stock” goes into the bucket-shop list as a fixed commodity, 
daily quoted. 

The gruesome dance of the Ghosts at Indianapolis was 
sad enough. That aboriginal function was performed by 
waving their own scalps, taken by their own hands, over 
the graves where their corpses moulder, beyond political 
resurrection. But the suicide party did not sell itself for 
Hanna’s ready cash. He knew it was only too willing to 
give itself away ; that it represents nothing but names ; 
an army of generals with no privates. They need no pay, 
now. They will get that later—perhaps—out of the treas¬ 
ury. 

But will the auction fund ever reach that other roll ; 
that grand army of sturdy privates that has—and needs— 
few officers and no pay ? In the South, the West and even 
in the East, these volunteers in the army of honesty are 
“for three months or the war.” They come from the 
farm, the forge, the workshop and the mine, throughout 
this whole land. Can Mark Hanna buy these men ? 

Even were they ready to sell their votes—which they 
are not, at any price—the lamp of McKinley’s Aladdin 
would have to be rubbed into holes, ere sum sufficient was 
raised to consummate the purchase. The bone and sinew 
of American suffrage would spurn the pitiful bribe that 
could be offered it, per capita. And the greasy Boss well 
knows that this outlying class cannot be corralled and 
penned for election uses, like the scum-lime of great 
cities. 

In them, he may win by outright auction methods. 
They have their big bosses and little bosses; they arc 
districted, redistricted, listed and numbered. The auc¬ 
tioneer—if he really raise the vaunted sums that make 
the mouths of the venal press literally slobber—may buy 
the city votes of some states. And they are Eastern 
states. 


22 


EAST, WEST AED SOUTH. 


Rut—even granting the bone and sinew of the democ¬ 
racy to be as purchasable as calves at the stockyards—the 
“fat frying” auctioneer is commended for facts to the 
Census bureau. Let him ask what time it takes to com¬ 
pile the census of a single state; remembering that no 
political discussion, and no dicker, delay those lists. Let 
him glance at the map and apply the scale to vast reaches 
of territory, sure to vote against his man ; to be reclaimed 
—if boodle can reclaim them—only by a house-to-house 
canvass of the continent. The very souls of this puffed 
political Robin Hood and of his merry men—if souls they 
have—will sicken before the magnitude of this task of 
buying the National vote ! 

They would have to locate every farm house, every 
work shop, every forge in the land; their “ missionaries ” 
lucky if the women did not drive them out with their 
ladles, and the men smear them, only outwardly, with 
soot. They would grow leg weary and go limping home 
with only such reward as follows “ fisherman’s luck !” 

If McKinley’s Boss combined in his flaccid person the 
astuteness of Tilden, the financial force of all the Roths¬ 
childs, and the thews and wind of Pompadour Jim, the 
task he has undertaken might well “flab him.” As his 
is merely the strength of cheek and jaw, it will “ knock 
him out in the first round !” Loudly as the windy vendor 
cries from his auction block, he can never sell the people 
at his price. And he knows it! 

But one man stands upon American soil to-day who 
can buy her popular vote. His name is William Jennings 
Bryan ! 

It is needless to gush over him. Packed and strug¬ 
gling thousands, eager to hear his “speech that is silver,” 
do their own gushing. It is needless to remind them of 
his methods of purchase. They are the plain, visible, 
never-counterfeited methods of truth, honesty and logic. 
They concrete, coin and prove the true ring of the 
speech that is silver. Still more needless were it to 


AT THE AUCTION BLOCK. 


insult him, by comparison with McKinley’s Boss, whose 
silent Joss is kept hidden from vulgar eyes, with pad¬ 
lock on his lips; whose silence is British-golden. 

But if the American masses are to be bought, the 
price for their votes will be principles, not dollars. Bryan, 
and not Hanna, is the purchaser to whom they will be 
knocked down ! The man who electrified the congregated 
—and delegated—brilliance, judgment and experience of 
the most honest party the country has known; who 
lifted himself to the leadership of the party—and of the 
whole people—by one single crystallization of its great 
truths; who has traversed the continent, only to find 
ever growing throngs hanging on his words and echoing 
his thoughts—may not be actually “inspired,” as many 
claim. 

But he has a marvellous rabbit’s foot! 

He has the God-given talisman of truth-born elo¬ 
quence and frank sincerity. His only secret is the secret 
Richelieu claimed as the foundation of all real power over 
men. With Richelieu he can say—and truly:—“I am 
just!” 

When the impressionable American masses get ready 
to sell themselves, they sell rapidly, and in blocks. But 
they fix their own price ever; and they will have only 
that. And they fix it in the sort of honest coin that suits 
themselves, “without consent of other nations ”—or of 
their subservient agents here at home. 

When they gather in packed thousands about that 
auction block, when Bryan does the crying, he can “knock 
tliem down in drovesas himself says : “ by the acre 
and not by the head.” Then every man goes away with 
his purchase price in his heart. No syndicates, no lists of 
millionaires, no emissaries and no “fat frying ” are need¬ 
ed there. 

Nowhere in history is found parallel for this meteor 
march of Truth. The preaching of Peter’s crusade, the 
flights of Luther, the bugle call of Patrick Henry did not 
so sway men. The faith-revolution, born from Mahom- 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


et’s lips, was not so swift—nor so high ; for the new proph¬ 
et preaches duty and his Koran is the great book of 
liumanism ! Nowhere in literature is limned its like, save 
in the master’s picture of Antony’s oration over dead 
Caesar. But here, in the people’s forum, a new and noble 
Antony shows to the masses the fresh, gaping wounds of 
clique-slaughtered Right; speaking words of fire ‘‘for 
these poor, dumb mouths.” And crowds that pack about 
the orator, to listen, go home, to think— and act. 

The future chronicler will record this new “ march to 
the sea ” as part of the Nation’s history. The campaign 
in Italy; the Valley swoop of Stonewall Jackson, were 
not more brilliant, nor resultful. It is the very might 
and prevalence of honesty! 

The whole American people are voluntary subscribers 
to their own purchase fund ; knowing that they are bought 
and paid for by the white coin of Truth, mined in the 
heart of humanity, fused in the God-lit fire of sincerity and 
minted in the brain of genius. 

This, and only this, is the price at which the masses 
of America can be bought. This is that “ honest dollar ” 
they are seeking ; and which hired and imported ranters 
fail to explain. On one side of its fair disc is stamped 
the plain legend: “Protection for our homes! Equal 
rights to all; ” on the reverse: “In God we trust!” 

Against this honest dollar Mark Hanna may bring 
his ineffectual millions of British-sweated gold and bond- 
wrung interest. Then let him, and his purchase-census 
takers of a free people, show his chattels—when they are 
bought. 

The foreign collar is welded about their necks with 
gold solder. 

They can never fasten one of spurious brass about the 
neck of free-breathing suffrage ! 


Y.—THE TAIL OF THE DOG. 

A sudden thought strikes me : let us swear eternal friendship. 

[George Canning. 

Biting a file is tough diet. 

It is equally hard on the teeth and the tongue. 

The Solid South is the file offered to the biting of the 
serpentine liar, squirming about that alleged pact of 
West and South against the East. 

In the very face of the facts as to this Solid South, is 
set up the absurd falsity that the longtime tail is now 
wagging the dog. 

That solidification and all its political progeny, for 
two past decades, prove beyond dispute that any pact, 
existent or inferential, was wholly between the South and 
the East. And all its fruits went to advantage the East. 
The South had to content herself by taking the parings 
and the core ; never the juicy meat. 

From its first political movement, the Solid South 
became—as it has ever since remained—the tail of the 
national democratic dog. It may not be impossible, as 
the drowning clutch at straws, that the South would 
have done its self-protective wagging for the dominant 
democracy in the West; but chance, or manipulation, 
fixed the business for the Southern tail; and ever since 
that day it has wagged towards sunrise. 

To prove this, a mere glance is needed at the succes¬ 
sive democratic conventions of the country. The first of 
these was held on the 12th May, 1832, in the city of Balti¬ 
more. This was the first convention enunciating its plat¬ 
form as party law; and upon it were placed Andrew 
Jackson, of Tennessee, and Martin Van Buren, of New 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


S6 

York. The sweeping success of that year made Balti¬ 
more the “lucky city” for democratic conventions. For 
the next quarter century, covering the convention of 1852, 
every national gathering of the party was held there. 
Martin Van Buren, of New York, was nominated at Bal¬ 
timore in 1840 and again in 1844. Four years later, the 
Baltimore convention named Lewis Cass, of Michigan; 
and in 1852, it chose Franklin Bierce, of New Hampshire. 

The first Western democratic convention was held at 
Cincinnati, in 1856; naming .lames Buclianan, of Penn¬ 
sylvania, as its standard bearer, with .lohn C. Breckin¬ 
ridge. of Kentucky, for vice-president. Then the aboli¬ 
tion and pro-slavery rings of democracy caused the memor¬ 
able and fatal triangular split. Again Baltimore was the 
convention seat in I860; the Eastern and Western demo¬ 
crats, in large majority, choosing Stephen A. Douglas as 
the nominee. The Charleston convention of that year, 
composed mainly of Southern democrats, nominated John 
C. Breckinridge; while a small third faction—prototype of 
to-day’s alleged “National democracy,” but with far 
ditferent motives, either hidden, or promulgated—chose 
John Bell, of Tennessee. 

This brief glance backward brings us to the thresh¬ 
old of that unnecessary war, which the democratic party 
might have averted by cohesion. But its record proves 
that, to tliat very threshold, the South wagged obediently 
as tail of the National democratic dog. And so, in large 
measure, may the West be noted as having been merely 
the rump and hind legs ; while the East was the motor 
head and fore-quarters. 

The McClellan campaign, following the Chicago con¬ 
vention of 1864, being a part of war history, has no concern 
in this liasty resume. But when the South had come—or 
had been brought back—into quasi status once more, the 
East lost no time in appending the partly severed tail to its 
long-assigned place in the party. 

The New York national convention of 1868 nominat¬ 
ed Horatio Seymour, of that state, for the presidency; 


THE TAIL OF THE DOG. 


27 


with Francis P. Plair, of Missouri, for second place. The 
not-yet Solid South aided and acquiesced unanimously in 
this choice. A^oiin in 1872, after a lapse of twenty 
years, Baltimore y:ot that notable convention, wliicli 
chose Horace Greely, of New York, as its candidate of ne¬ 
cessity ; the seci)nd place goin^ to B. Gratz Brown, of 
Missouri. The O’Conor side issue of that campaif^n need 
not be touched upon, save as object lesson of uselessness 
to that “National Democracy,” which to-day apes it in 
power -if by no means in principle. 

The O'Conor cabal really wanted to beat Greely, be¬ 
cause he was a republican. The Palrner-Buckner trust 
really wants to beat Bryan—because they are not demo¬ 
crats, but masked republicans. 

Samuel .1. Tilden, of New York, was nominated in 
1876, by the St. Louis convention. Again, in 1880, at the 
Cincinnati convention a New Yorker was chosen. Win¬ 
field Scott Hancock was candidate for president, and Wil¬ 
liam H. English, of Indiana, for vice-president. Again 
the head of the democratic dog got the head of the ticket; 
again the rump took second place, without protest; and 
again the Southern tail wagged with cheery unanimity. 

Grover Cleveland, of New York, was chosen demo¬ 
cratic standard-bearer by the Chicago convention of 1884 ; 
Indiana again getting second place in the person of 
Thomas A. Hendricks. Then the Southern tail wagged 
so wildly as somewhat to discompose the national demo¬ 
cratic dog. It has wagged wilder and more wild for its 
New York fetich ever since; threatening seriously the 
equilibrium of the entire animal, and causing grave dis¬ 
quiet to his Eastern head. 

The St. Louis convention, of 1888, repeated the New 
York choice of Cleveland ; placating the West with Allan 
G. Thurman, of Ohio, as his running mate. And again 
the Southern tail wagged wildly ; and merrily—until the 
votes were cast and counted. 

Finally, in 1892, New York again got first place upon 


28 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


the ticket;; Grover Cleveland and Adlai E. Stevenson, of 
Illinois. And again the tail wagged ; this time very mer¬ 
rily and to most useful result. The animal’s equilibrium 
was firmly re-established ; apparently without future 
danger to its poise. 

Any thinking being, glancing backward at this list of 
conventions and their selections, can figure out but one 
fact. If there has been compact, or alliance, between the 
sections in the past; if political prearrangement—instead 
of circumstantial force and supposed unison of interest- 
lias brought them together—then the alliances of the ante 
helium, as well as of the post democracy of the South 

have all been with their Eastern, and not with their 
Western, party brethren. 

Nor has the Eastern party, of the first part, ever 
failed carefully to hull the corn, before tossing to the 
Southern party of the second part the cob and the shucks. 

Through past to present, this tale of a tail is nowhere 
differently told. Yet to-day, in the face of party facts— 
made and manipulated into such by its own acts—the 
Eastern head would flay the Southern tail. And this, not 
because it refuses still to preserve its old time function 
and wag for the democratic dog; but because it stiffens 
out, in a stand, against the new scent of a mongrel be¬ 
tween John Sherman and the Anglo-British Trust kennel. 

When the so-called “silver craze” caught the South of 
to-day, sweeping its democratic strength with the swirl of 
a prairie fire, there was no expression—in any single South¬ 
ern state—of antagonism to Eastern dominance. South¬ 
ern thinkers had merely changed their thought. They 
had begun to make it, instead of taking it ready made. 

State after state declared, in unmistakable terms, 
against the single gold standard. Delegations from them 
all were sent to the Chicago convention, instructed only 
to uphold bimetallism. But this thought revolution 
against the gold idea was, in no remote sense, because it 
was Eastern ; for the East had not yet spoken openly. It 


THE TAIL OF THE DOG. 


29 


was because gold monometallism was the British idea. 
And, be it remembered, its arch-priest was a Western 
republican statesman ! 

The revolt of the tail was neither against the Eastern 
head, nor the Western rump, of the national democratic 
dog. It was against Anglo-American John Shermanism, 
into which the democratic party had been lured to plunge, 
and was floundering like Csesar in the Tiber. And Cains 
Cassius Cleveland, plunging in to save it ere it sunk, had 
gone down in the yellow flood, because of clogging British 
gold upon his boots ! 

It was the spontaneous revolt of honest democracy 
against false monies, counterfeiting the “honest dollar 
It was the protest of Americans, while southerners, 
against the transfusion of national life blood, through 
our treasury, into British varicose veins; and even then 
getting its measure by pints for quarts. 

The South became unanimous for bimetallism, solely 
because she believed that one money for debtor and an¬ 
other money for creditor was not “honest money.” She 
could not comprehend any system of flnance which made 
its treasury the almoner of a small, privileged* class of 
alien money-changers and their, misnamed American, 
middle men. She could comprehend neither the sense, 
nor the honesty, of issuing bonds to these men “payable 
in coin,” and then insisting upon their payment “ in gold.” 

And especially the South could not comprehend the 
wisdom of an executive, who sent special messages to con¬ 
gress, differentiating the cost of these different bonds to 
the people taxed to pay them who took counterfeit 
credit for statesmanship, by the millions he had saved 
that people by that very differentiation ; and then per¬ 
mitted the empty wind of “ national honor” to rule that 
“coin” meant only “gold.” They could comprehend 
these things the less from Mr. Cleveland, because his 
message—“ to the whole people, through congress ”— 


30 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


plainly upheld so much of the platform upon which 
he was elected, which demanded that it should mean 
gold or silver. 

The South became unanimous for silver only when 
she saw the foreign money changers put their gold into 
the treasury and get their bonds ; then saw them draw 
out that same gold, to hoard it against the next bond 
issue. She was perhaps dull, for she could not learn finan¬ 
cial jugglery. She—in common with all the plain people 
every where—never could tell under which thimble the 
pea would be, in this treasury game of “ Now you see it; 
now you don’t!” 

These, and these alone, are the causes of silver senti¬ 
ment throughout the South. But when she sent her 
delegates to Chicago, to protest against further financial 
thimble-rigging, she made no compact or alliance, even 
among her own sisterhood and household. How, then, 
could she have made either with those of a distant and 
diverse section ? 

Those delegates, bearing the solemn protest of the 
people against the money changers, yet had no instruc¬ 
tions else^ It has been shown how they differed as to 
men, believing them honest democrats. 

There could be imagined no asininity more hollow- 
more baseless in its bray—more easily stripped of that 
lion’s hide whence it mocks the true roar—than this 
charged alliance between sections, that have never held 
political affiliation, against one that has ever held it with 
the South. The West has most often opposed us in the 
party’s councils. The Eastern democratic dog, not the 
Western, has ever wagged the Southern tail. 

And now that this tail stands stiffly out, when the 
national dog has pointed its game, must the animal be 
dismembered? When the covey is flushed, will it prove 
really the East—or one small Eastern hatched brood—that 
has raised all the false scent ? 

The free silver flame that has swept the Western 
prairies and the Southern cotton fields alike, is spreading 


THE TAIL OF THE DOG. 


31 


fast and far. It lias lit up Faneuiel Hall and Tammany 
in one common glare. Its roar has rumbled down in Cali¬ 
fornia gold mines; is now echoing even to the New Eng¬ 
land hills ! If this makes alliance between the South and 
the West, it would seem that the masses of the whole 
nation are in the wordless pact. 

Hanna’s man sits like chiselled Memnon, in his Ohio 
home. His padlocked lips dare not open. Even the 
golden sunset touching them fails to make them vocal. 

The people’s man talks from his heart to earnest 
thousands, in the very “holy of holies” of gold thimble¬ 
rigging. He speeds across New York, Pennsylvania and 
Ohio—to the very threshold of that temple where the 
padlocked Memnon sits mute; never fearing to speak 
what he believes—never failing to reach the hearts of 
those that hear. 

Is the “unreconciled slave-owner,” who has connived 
with the “Western anarchist” to ruin the innocent 
Eastern Anglo-American, responsible for this “alliance” 
of truth and popular instinct ? If not, it might seem that 
the syndicate clique of Wall street had made alliance 
with John Carlisle and John Sherman, to ruin South and 
East and West alike ! 

The cause that has to bolster itself by false witness 
against its neighbor must needs be weak. It must know 
its own weakness. It must feel the throes of fast-coming 
dissolution. Well might it give over lying, and fall to 
praying ; crying aloud the biblical aspiration : 

“Remove far from me Yanity and Lies; give me neither 
poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me !” 

Whether the cause of the syndicates be wholly dead, 
or not, it is already rotten. It smells to heaven. It is 
too far gone to be saved by the salt of Ananias. 

“An ounce of civet, good apothecary !” 


\L—THE OLD SOUTH. 

So the old order changeth, giving place to new. 

[Tennyson. 

Nature is all change. 

Out of decay all progress generates. 

No change can be conceived greater than the trans¬ 
muting the South has undergone. It may be well to pause 
here and glance back at her methods. 

The ante helium South—conservative beyond the 
verge of non-progressiveness—was, for a half century pre¬ 
ceding the war, a sealed book to most of the states. To 
many men to-day, it is as unfamiliar as the history of 
Assyria, or the building of the Pyramids. 

In sparse settlements, depending upon one main staple 
product, and leading lives of comparative ease and com¬ 
fort by it, the whites of the South were an isolated peo¬ 
ple. The great planters were practically the lords of the 
soil; the poorer whites were their dependents; and the 
blacks—the only real laboring class—were their chattels. 

Yet, the sluggish ante helium South was—in fact, 
though not in name,—the flef of the East. Cotton was 
nominally king ; but to the East the South looked wholly 
for her market, her finance, her luxuries and her litera¬ 
ture. That she made sporadic efforts for self-assertion, 
in many ways, is true; but it is equally so that she re¬ 
mained the material thrall of the national money centre. 
And, as theory follows interest ever, she grew to be its 
political thrall. 

It were bootless here to discuss details of the dead old 
parties of the South; or how the new ones of the present 
grew out of their graves. Federalism, Whiggery, Nullifi¬ 
cation and Secession are long since “ mouldering in the 


THE OLD SOUTH 


33 


gmve,” thougli happily it is not true that their “ spirit is 
marching on.” The succeedant shoots from their graves 
were more vigorous, if scarcely more lasting; but when¬ 
ever it has been thought that “ the time was out of joint,” 
parties have disjointed to meet the time, if not “to set it 
right.” 

All thinkers have figured for themselves how the ante 
helium South—that sub-federation, which its survivors 
proudly call “ The Old South ’’—fitted herself to the needs 
of the Eastern situation. There was then a no less exist¬ 
ent, because unbaptized, alliance between these two sec¬ 
tions. as against the younger, and then weaker, political 
West. This is no novel fact; nor is its statement new in 
any sense. 

In a consideration of the “ Rending of the Solid 
South,” published eighteen months ago—when her gold 
and silver factions both had strong grips upon the wind¬ 
pipe of her democracy—I took occasion to say ; The ante 
helium South was a nation within a nation. Its adhesion 
to the government was merely economic; not moral, or 
systemal. The existence of slavery was probably the 
cause; but, however that may be, the fact was as pal¬ 
pable as existent that the South, and especially the Cot¬ 
ton States, were aristocratic in practice whatever was 
their theory of republicanism. The land owners and 
planters of the country, with their city factors, were the 
dominant class. They gave the time, and the scattered 
popular masses were content to march to it; even im¬ 
bibing, in large degree, that arrogance of idea and ex¬ 
pression, which became a species of sectional pride. This 
statement of a now recognized and accepted truth is 
neither “disloyal,” nor controvertible. Its unfounded 
theory of sectional superiority was alive with the whole 
Southern people; it marched up to the very threshold of 
civil war, and beyond, shoulder to shoulder with that real 
patriotic impulse, for which it sometimes mistook itself. 
The dominant aristocracy of social eminence and wealth 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


S4 

brought popular thought into practical vassalage; and it 
required the rough, bitter and bloody lesson of tlie early 
struggle to disabuse it of a basic error. 

Such was the true condition of the Southern system 
in those days. Kealizing it, there is no mere figure of 
speech in saying that Mr. Lincoln’s emancipation procla¬ 
mation was the first great movement for the manumission 
of the Southern whites. While it made them, momen¬ 
tarily, the political thralls of the new freedman, and his 
new alien masters, it struck from Southern thought those 
sliackles of habit which had made the whites, for a full 
half century, the actual slaves of the effete slave system. 

Cotton had been literally king; the planters his feudal 
barons. The minor agriculturalists, the factors of the 
commercial towns, and the scattered handlers of other 
industries—all of whom lived and had their being by mere 
grace of the staple—could declare no business, or political, 
independence of the East. The factors, buyers and ship¬ 
pers—who, like all stewards, managed the strong boxes of 
their lords—were wholly dependent upon those money 
centres, wherein prices were fixed and exchange con¬ 
trolled, even that early, by refiected foreign interests. 
Even then, the small Southern middle men turned their 
faces to the East, when they prayed for profit; and the 
East turned her face to England. 

But with all this the South of yore held to her senti¬ 
mental assumption of superiority over other sections. 
Democratic in name only, her ante helium belief was that 
she held the “chosen people;” that, in some unproved 
way, they were of finer clay than the average staff, of 
which the country’s other population was moulded. So, 
producing only cotton, and the twin crops of rice and 
cane—and handling these under dictation of foreign-ruled 
money-changers of the East—the ante helium South was 
theoretically aristocratic, and practically in serfdom. 

Courtliness, generosity and elegance, equally with 
courage and hospitality of lavish kind, were inborn with 
the better class. But under such a system—as ever in 


THE OLD SOUTH. 


35 


slave countries—the fall thence to the lowest class was 
sudden and unbroken. Middle class, as such, there was 
actually none. 

The old time Southron turned up his nose at the 
“mudsills” of the East and West alike; even while he 
took practical dictation from the former. Theyoun^ and 
undeveloped West, of that day, had no direct business 
hold either upon the South’s product, or upon her now 
acknowledged facilities for commercial advance. These 
last—while bountifully given by nature, and now showing 
plainly to every thinker who scans the map of the Union 
—were then wholly ignored in her business scheme. The 
South remained the mere hewer of wood and drawer of 
water for the East. 

This, all the surroundings considered, was logical re¬ 
sult. It was the direct outcome of the system of near a 
century; a system content to creak along in those old 
ruts, which offered easiest a direct profit, without reckon¬ 
ing of changing conditions that must, in time, demand 
new methods. It was natural, but it was also suicidal; 
for it left the old South—with her vaunted independence, 
and her assumed superiority—only the commercial peon 
of her canny eastern sister. 

To a more limited extent, somewhat similar condi¬ 
tions were existent in the young West—though from far 
different reasons. For a time there were practically two 
Cinderellas, and but one proud sister. But the West— 
partly from her rapidity and spread of growth, but far 
more from greater diversity of interests and, most of all, 
from personal characteristics—more promptly shook the 
ashes from her clothes; found her fairy godmother in her 
own soil, and became ready to mount her own pumpkin 
chariot. 

But the South, ignorant of her real status, sat by the 
hearthside with haughty ignorance of her menial role. 
With all her fallacious theories—which habit had indu¬ 
rated into absolute credal beliefs—she found herself upon 


36 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


tlie brink of actual revolution; balanced upon it, hesitant, 
only an instant; then plunged into the angry and doubt¬ 
ful stream of events—and the red Rubicon was crossed. 

What followed that plunge, for four bitter and unpar¬ 
alleled years, it is no part of this paper’s intent to discuss. 
But, close-treading upon the heels of the so-called peace, 
came “Reconstruction”; a situation unique in the world’s 
history, and as destructive as it was unique. 

Nor were its baleful effects confined to the spoiled 
territory alone. The actual victors held aloof; but a 
vast sweep of producing territory was given over, as polit¬ 
ical prey, to a horde of alien adventurers, leagued with 
native renegades. These, under forged laws and distorted 
statutes, manipulated masses of newly enfranchised black 
ignorance. For years the ugly saturnalia held. It ceased 
only when its plain results tingled down the pocket-nerve 
of the section whence it came. 






WILLIAM McKinley 

REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT. 








































YIL—RECOISSTRUCTION, 

There is^no^political Brown-Sequard. 

The lesson of all nations teaches that the “ elixir of 
life ” cannot be injected by the politico-economic syringc- 
All attempts to force, under the skin of a people, unac. 
customed political toxicants have produced only tumors. 
They have been followed, often, by blood poison; never 
by actual sanity. 

“ Reconstruction,” as it was misnamed, only bred new 
and dangerous germs in the Southern body-politic. Out of 
its forced hypodermic grew the carpetbagger, and the 
scalawag ; new forms and noisome, but equally dangerous 
to sectional health. 

Viewed from every logical standpoint, this reconstruc¬ 
tion policy was a flat and disastrous failure. It hoisted, 
petard-like, the radical engineers who invented it; left 
no tangible residuum, save in the pockets of the adven¬ 
turers it bred ; and retarded the real, material reconstruc¬ 
tion of the South, for ten years of actual uselessness, and 
for twenty more of their usufruct. 

Directly out of reconstruction grew solidification of 
the South, for very existence and self-preservation. Yet 
this was, from many aspects, a draw-back to her rapid, or 
steady, material recuperations ; for 

The spirit of murder worked, in the very means of life! 

The Solid South, concreted into a threatening political 
entrinery, antagonized capital and retarded immigration. 
Meanwhile it gave no adequate compensation. 

The fungi, the carpetbaggers, came from all sections 
with greedy impartiality. They were from East and West 
and North ; their only needed credentials being alleged 


38 EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 

republican politics. Brains, or capital; even honesty and 
clean reputation, were in no wise essentials for such suc¬ 
cess as they carae to achieve. The vast majority of them 
were political bummers ; camp followers and scullions of 
the regular army of the victorious party. They came for 
booty only; but to filch, not conquer, it. They loudly 
vaunted themselves the saviors of the raw and ignorant 
freedmen; lived among them, and preyed upon their cred¬ 
ulous natures. They held continuous camp-meeting; 
leading in prayer for abolition of the hand-tied white 
native, and sang everywhere the legendary hymn of forty 
acres and a mule. Among them were few real old soldiers, 
fewer still who had won titles they disported ; fewest of 
all those who had either credit, or social standing, at 
home. 

The “ seizin'” of the Norman and his iron grip upon 
the Saxon throat were astute statesmanship and the touch 
of the velvet glove, when compared with this carpetbag 
invasion. The better class of incoming aliens could not 
endure the appellation, nor blind themselves to its sure 
results. Sympathy, humanism and interest alike combined 
to align them with the native whites. These promptly sided 
with the disfranchised and law-manacled home people. 
They became de facto Southerners, so soon as they invested 
either money, or effort, in the South; for they realized 
that the future outcome of this section—her real recon¬ 
struction-must come through its native leaders only. 
Thus it happens that some of the best and most progres¬ 
sive citizens of the South to-day—whether they be demo¬ 
crats or republicans—are men who came in the wake of 
the carpet-bag invasion. 

The scalawag germ was still more loathsome, and of 
even lower grade in the evolution scale. It comprised 
home-born opponents of everything that the South needed, 
or had struggled for; and its sole claim to recognition 
under the republican microscope was that it had been 
disloyal to every natural instinct and to every early tradi- 


BEC0N8 TB UCTION. 


39 


tion. Perhaps a more just clia^fnosis of the species might 
be that the carpetbagger was the political itch-worm ; 
the scalawag the germ of sectional tuberculosis. 

But enfranchised Cuffee took each alike, and both 
eagerly; and his present condition to-day, everywhere in 
the Black Belt, shows symptoms of only slow recovery. 

Banded together for the one object of gain, these 
unsavory brethren soon secured absolute dominion over 
the ignorant negroes, in every state of the South. The 
result was a spectacle never before exhibited in the 
world’s history; happily impossible of repetition upon the 
civilized globe. 

Every office of profit was gobbled by the hungry ad¬ 
venturers, through the votes of their negro dupes—driven 
like hogs to the ballot-pens. These were permitted to 
elect themselves to the legislatures, town councils and 
police courts; to any places that carried but nominal 
salary. But the governors, judges, collectors, marshals, 
mayors—all fat and important offices—were parcelled out 
between the carpetbaggers and the scalawags. They 
even forced themselves into the highest positions in the 
federal government; filling the seats of former clean and 
brainy congressmen, and making the cheeks of senators 
tingle by their vicinage. 

Where there were not men enough to go around, the 
places were duplicated in the chosen men ; and it is well 
known fact that, during the reconstruction orgy, one 
individual frequently held two, three, even four salaried 
positions, state and national, at the same time. But that 
individual never was woolly-headed. The blackness in 
him never showed outwardly on his skin. 

That was the first Solid South. In those halcyon 
days of robbery, state governments and national legisla¬ 
tors were of but one stripe. It mattered nothing to 
radical purposes that the stripes worn by some of them 
might previously have been of another pattern. So long 
as election returns came in on the desired side, no 
awkward questions were asked about the returning offi- 


JfO EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 

cers. Votes were all that were wanted in congress and 
the electoral college. If those votes came, it mattered 
nothing what mongrel adventurers sat in the former seats 
of Clay, Calhoun, Tucker, Benjamin and their peers. 

Neither did it matter, then, if the credit of the war- 
impoverished and product-throttled states was recklessly 
pledged for ruinous sums; if taxes, and interest imposts 
wholly unbearable, were levied upon a people barely able 
to And the means of daily life. And the sums thus wrung 
out of them were not squandered, but hoarded. No public 
improvements, no schools, no civic protection were set up 
by these germ rulers. But the salaries were lavish ex¬ 
ceeding; for they went into their own pockets. The 
people were left to hold the bag—when it was emptied. 
They are holding it, in some places, to-day. 

It is easy to prate glibly of Southern “repudiation.” 
It is easy to rant about “the unreconciled slave-owners 
of the South.” Most of the praters neither know, nor 
care, about the origin of a load of debt, piled through 
vicarious statute upon Southern shoulders by alien and 
dishonest hands, until it became crushing—ruinous— 
absolutely unsupportable. 

When the free man of the East, or of the West, reads 
of “white supremacy” it excites no feeling, save perhaps 
antagonism. It carries with it no meaning deeper than a 
sectional political cry. In the light of the literal facts, 
here barely outlined, the term may take for him the new 
signiflcance of resistance to robber oppression ; self-pro¬ 
tection and self-existence. 

It cannot seem strange that the South—conscious of 
her great possibilities, harassed, goaded and bound for 
flaying alive—at last rose solidly to shake off the leeches 
that were sucking her life blood, for enrichment of their 
own base veins. It cannot be wondered that re-enfran- 
chisement made the ballot of the Solid South more deadly 
than her discarded rifles; that her people marched to the 
polls in unbroken phalanx—on their banners the refrain 
of the national hymn : “ God and our Native Land !” 




RE CO NS TR UCTION 


41 


Leaving aside all ijride of race, self-preservation be¬ 
came their first and only law. Doggedly, sturdily, and 
with one impulse the long-enduring South at last rose 
against the modern Vandals that had swooped down upon 
her. Sometimes with necessary violence—always with 
steady purpose to protect their own—the men of the whole 
section turned upon their unclean oppressors. They were 
routed, displaced and driven out. The South was recon¬ 
structed, at last! 

The legacy left by reconstruction was ghastly to con¬ 
template. Its heritors were well nigh hopeless. In many 
states loomed mountainous debts. In every one was 
clogged production. The richest natural section of the 
Union was scarcely capable of feeding itself. It was 
utterly hopeless of meeting the vicarious obligations that 
had gone to fatten the political vultures, preying upon 
her vitals. 

When the modern Prometheus struck the chains from 
his wrists, and stepped from the rock of republicanism, 
nominally free, he might well have groaned because the 
beak of the thing battening upon him had not proved 
fatal! 

Yet, the worst and most enduring legacy of all that 
reconstruction left the South, was ill repute. Unstable 
statutes and unenforced laws had made person and prop¬ 
erty alike unsafe. With richest soil, unparalleled offer¬ 
ings for mineral experiment and untold wealth of lumber 
and timber, she was absolutely paralyzed. She could not 
move without capital, skilled labor and new population. 

With wide thrown doors and genuine welcome for all 
honest immigration, the repossessed whites found it shun¬ 
ning their section. With offerings for investment, equal¬ 
led nowhere else on earth, they saw capital eyeing them 
askant. The word had gone abroad that the laws of the 
Southern States were weak and non-protective; and cap¬ 
ital and labor alike demanded stable statutes and their 
honest enforcement. 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


4-2 


Such, in brief glance, are the coldly true details of 
“ Reconstruction.” Well might the Southron say of it: 

The children born of thee are sword and fire ; 

Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws ! 

Small wonder that any policy—even a “shot-gun pol¬ 
icy” was resort to drive out the alien blood-suckers that 
had clung too long ! 

But the descendants of those who had ridden with 
Smith and Bienville and DeSoto through early Southern 
wastes, were not of the stuff to sit supine in the new 
wastes about them, strewn with the ruins of their all. 
They siezed the fragments of the past in strong hands ; 
re-erected laws, restored order, and went to work with one 
common impulse to rebuild the toppled temples of their 
sires. 

Reconstruction once understood by them, the better 
classes of the East and West and North looked upon that 
political “Witches’ Sabbath” with equal amaze and dis¬ 
gust. Gradually, as its ugly truths painted themselves 
blacker and plainer upon the page of the Nation’s history, 
interest added its protest to moral condemnation. Dis¬ 
tant thinkers saw that the robber hand was throttling 
Southern production; making the most useful section 
useless in the practical scheme of national progress. Then 
came the revulsion. Northern sentiment denounced 
carpetbaggery and the scalawags ; and their most rabid 
republican associates—those “rebel-haters” by instinct— 
tabooed both and helped in their discrediting. 

Reconstruction was the progeny of alien greed, out of 
home ignorance. Home intelligence and home need rose 
to reassert their rights. 

But they asked, then, no alliance with the West. 

Out of reconstruction was born the Solid South. Its 
alliance was with the East. 


\m.—THE “ISEW SOUTH." 


He could distinguish, and divide 
A iiair, ’twixt Soutli and Southwest side. 

f Butler's Hudibras. 

There is* much in a cry. 

It tickles the ear to concrete a campaign into an 
axiom. “Old Hickory” was a telling cry. So was “Tip¬ 
pecanoe and Tyler, too ! ” 

The American masses are ever susceptible. Flatter 
their pride in their own belief that they think, and you 
have them. This has ever been the theory of winning 
party leaders of the past,—before auctioneering be¬ 
gan. The keen author of “The Bigelow Papers” knew it, 
when his wooden-legged old candidate says : 

Cull me old Timber Toes. That’s wot the people likes; 

Phrases combinin’ moral truth witli axioms sech as strikes! 

Far-sighted, gallant and gifted Henry Grady knew it. 
when lie christened “ The New South.” 

“ Honest money ” is the latter day shibboleth of the 
money changers; but the masses recognize it as all cry 
and no wool. And so with the Grady name. It was cry 
and nothing else. It was not even the “shade of a 
namefor there was not substance behind it to cast a 
shadow. The eloquent and earnest son of Georgia, who 
gave the country that cry, understood its people. To 
bring his section to the lips of men, was to make it more 
potent factor in the affairs of men. 

The Old South was not dead. She had been down to 
the gates of death; she had trod the Valley of the 
Shadow; but she still lived. Exhausted by supreme effort 
for life, she lay panting—almost powerless. To hasten her 


u EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 

recovery, quicken her pride—and with that, her strength 
among her sisters—she must have at least lip-sympathy. 
She must feel the touch of friendly hands, and hear the 
earnest—if interested—words of encouragement. 

Henry Grady knew all this. All honor to him for the 
knowledge ; and for the judgment to make it prollt his 
people ! But when he baptized the “Hew South,” under 
the very shadow of Faneuil Hall, Grady knew that there 
was no existence for it in fact, or outside of his own fervid 
imagination. He was too keen a judge of men not to 
have known this. But the cry caught. It soothed the 
sore sentiment of the time, and echoed from East to West. 
Men heard of the “ Hew South ” from Alaska to the Florida 
Keys—from Canada to the Golden Gate. But the baptism 
was in the East. There, too, was the alliance. 

The old East, grasping at a new ally in her life-strug¬ 
gle with the growing young giant of the AVest, clasped 
the “Hew South” to her heart, and—proceeded to use 
her. 

In cold truth there is not—there never has been—a 
“Hew South.” It were no more possible to un-race men, 
than to un-sex them. The blood, heritage of thought, 
climatic influence and habit of education that go to make 
up a people, cannot be changed by a name; telling cry as 
that name may become. The fast-vanishing Indian will 
disappear as the red man. Constitutional amendments 
and philanthropic societies have made the black man no 
less the negro to-day, because he was dubbed “Freedman,” 
or nicknames himself “Afro-American.” 

The South of this year of political change, A.D. 1896, 
is no more a “Hew South,” than was the South of seces¬ 
sion, or of reconstruction. She is the same old South, in 
thought, habit and sentiment; changed only in that she 
has dashed from her eyes the opiate of sloth, that dulled 
their vision for a century. How she opens them, wide 
and keen, upon the living issues of a busy to-day. She 
has begun to think for herself, in place of clothing her 


THE ^^NEW SOVTIH^ 


46 

brain in the hand-me-down garb of thought, sent her 
from the North. Now she clothes her ideas in fresher 
modes; and she demands to dress herself. 

The South has waked from her semi-stupor. She is 
ready to use, for her own best advantage, every tittle of 
productive possibility on her rich soil; in the forests that 
so long sighed idly above it; in the womb of her hills 
beneath it. She stretches out honest hands for honest 
aid in great and mutual effort, come whence it may— 
from East, or West. She has grown in well-doing, for she 
now begins to help herself—and that in very earnest. At 
first. 

Out of her weakness and her melancholy, 

As is very potent with such spirits— 

she called aloud, to the West and to the East: “Come 
and build me up!” To a certain measure, both came; 
the East with her capital and her example of energy ; the 
West with new and valuable population. 

Advanced one step, the South changed her invocation, 
calling: “Come and help me build up 1” This was the bet¬ 
ter call, and the braver. The answer to it was more gen¬ 
eral and more practical. Mines began to open, forests to 
seek the change by new saw mills, and gardens to diversify 
waste stretches of truck-land. The capital of the East, 
the skill of the North, the hard-handed industry of the 
West began to aid the now recuperant and self-helpful 
South. 

At last, she had learned, in part, her own value as a 
factor in the vast aggregate of national wealth. That 
knowledge renewed her self-respect, in the same ratio as 
it demanded the respect of sister sections. It was the 
basis of her new declaration of material independence; 
and it gave the South courage to call, to all the world : 
“ Come and see me build myself up /” 

In the open scheme of mutual advantage, daily be¬ 
coming better known, there was neither need for alliance. 


I^G EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 

or compact with any one section ; nor the desire for it, as 
against any other. She needed them all for her mineral, 
agricultural and commercial progress. 

That progress paid them all. They were necessary to 
her; she was essential to them. She had again become— 
and vastly more than ever before—a banner-bearer in the 
triumphant procession of national advance. But it was 
equally her policy and her desire to make her motto : 
“Live and let live!” She needed the trade of the East. 
It was vital to the extending of her manufacture of her 
own product; in developing her untold mineral wealth ; 
most especially in the disposal of her main staple. She 
sorely needed the vigorous labor of the West, in perfect¬ 
ing her new farming interests; even more, she needed the 
huge overplus of grain and meat from the world’s great 
feeding-store, to prosper her ambitious plans for commer¬ 
cial importance, through her natural and improved ports. 

For all these things the South strove. For no one of 
them all was other alliance needed than the simple and 
wordless one of , mutual profit. Far less could the thinkers 
of the South have tolerated the idea of a compact with 
any one section, that impaired the usefulness of any other 
to her own hopeful and steady advance. Writing for 
common-school children, I should not think it necessary 
to amplify this self-asserting fact. I might as well pro¬ 
claim that no sane man would cut off his own right arm, 
to the end of making his left arm stronger. 

But even had there been a “ New South”—either sys- 
temal, political, or financial—this card-board erection of 
her alliance with the West tumbles at a breath. These 
pages emphasize only what all history of the past has 
proved ; that the usufruct of all the natural wealth, labor 
and development of the South—even of what little com¬ 
merce and foreign interchange she then had—advantaged 
the East, not the West. 

The former, seeing the opportunities offered her, had 
ever been quick to utilize them. The only error apparent 


THE ^^NEW SOUTTH^ 


47 


in her close calculation of usufruct, has been one of belief. 
This was the cardinal error that, because she had bought 
the staples and land and minerals of a people—had in¬ 
vested with them money that paid its higher profit to tlie 
capitalist—slie had also bought the will and the conscience 
of that people. 

wSIower than her active Eastern rival, the West had 
never even put the South under contribution for so much 
gratitude—if such be the unwritten usury—for assistance 
in her struggle for material reconstruction. She had ever 
hesitated, as will be shown, to use the plain advantages 
of export and import offered. She had failed to realize 
tliose potent, natural truths of geographic saving, which 
would have made her largely independent of eastern car¬ 
riage. She is only beginning to open her eyes to the ne-* 
cessity to her of the southern ports; of that commerce, 
still further south, that she needs must reach through 
them in the near future. 

Herein alone lies Hat disproof of the silly campaign 
lie, that prates of political alliance with the West, against 
the business interests of the East. The old South, years 
ago, felt the well nigh fatal results of reconstruction. 
The old South, to-day, finds life too promising to risk hari 
kari by constriction. 

As to mere political alliances—whether by chance or 
by agreement—enough has been shown to prove that any 
and all such, in the past, have been with the East and 
not with the West; that any and all usufruct from them— 
of all kinds soever—has gone towards sunrise, and away 
from sunset. 

Even were there a “ New South,” her every practical 
interest to-day would indicate absolute freedom from all 
“entangling alliances.” She would be compelled to act, 
in practice, the theory of staunch old Abraham Lincoln : 
“ With charity towards all; malice towards none.” 

But there is no “New South.” That catch-name— 


4 


k8 EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 

christened by the lips of sectional hope on the steps of 
Faneuil Hall, with Boston for baptismal sponsor—has 
never been accepted, used, or legalized by the popular 
voice of this section. She is the same old South still ; 
while a South refreshed and rejuvenated by rest upon the 
bosom of her Mother Earth; an old wrestler, girding her 
loins and bracing her every muscle afresh, for her cease¬ 
less struggle with progress. 

She is the old South of day-before-yesterday; but 
with her cleared eyes fixed straight upon day-after-to¬ 
morrow ! 



\x —the: vermiform appendix. 

And the tinal event to him has been that, as lie rose like a rocket, he 
may fall like the stick. {Thomas Paine. 

The people of the Soutli honestly believe that Bryan 
and Sewall will be elected. 

They believe that they will be elected with, or with¬ 
out. the Southern populist vote. 

The democrats hope and believe this; the McKinley 
“National democrats” fear and believe it; the repuVtli- 
cans—where found—believe it in their pockets; and the 
populists proper believe it, because they intend to assist 
in the fact, to ensure their main desire. 

The masses of democracy base this faith upon the 
supreme and resistless power of the people of this country 
to carry their point, when once they are enlisted, aligned 
and marching shoulder to shoulder to the bloodless battle 
of the ballot. They are so marching now, under that 
white flag they believe in, and will fight for as their lives; 
and they are marching to victory. 

The pretended-doubting bolters believe in that result, 
because they know that, in every Southern state, each 
one of them can cast his own vf)te—but the vote of no 
other man soever—for McKinley, or an They pre¬ 

tend to pin their faith in that victory of boodle and tariff, 
which they feebly essay to aid, to but one nrgument:— 
that the money power of the syndicates and corporations 
is behind Mark tlanna, and his masked—but spiked— 
batteries, under their mongrel flag. 

The Southern republicans—few and far between as 
they are—read more honestly the handwriting on the wall. 
Correctly, if gloomily, they study the lesson of widespread 
popular revolt against bossism and its privileged classes. 


50 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


in every section ; in the higher ranks of Eastern, Western 
and Northern democracy; even in the late solid and dis¬ 
ciplined ranks of republicanism ! They offer no argument 
against these facts. They only shake solemn heads and 
mutter : “ The money power is behind our Iloss. Hanna 

will have funds in amount you cannot meet.” Tint, so 
muttering, they thrust helpless hands deep into their own 
empty pockets: and the faint, dawning hope of a new 
reconstruction goes out from among them. 

The populists feel that Bryan will sweep the country, 
because they know the vast change in their own ranks, 
everywhere. And nowhere is it so great as in the south¬ 
ern states. Throughout this entire section, the once pow¬ 
erful opposition to local democracy has dwindled to pro¬ 
portions that are nowise formidable. This result comes 
from two plain causes; for the growth of the populist 
party in the South came from but two basic causes ; the 
demand for more circulating medium among the people, 
and the insistance on an honest count, at all elections. 
Tliese were parents of the dead Farmers’ Alliance. That 
was own daddy to populism. 

The very crux of the populists was built of these de¬ 
mands. Other points of their platform are episodic, sen¬ 
timental and accepted as Quixotic. Their shrewdest 
leaders never expect them to concrete into national 
statutes ; and the rank and tile neither understand nor 
care for them. 

Ihit what the populists of the whole country demand 
to-day, most of all—what the populists of the South will 
sacrifice all else to gain—is the free coinage of silver. 

This is the new crux of populism; as their convention 
proved, in its unanimous acceptance of the democratic 
nominee; silver's apostle and champion. Their platform 
was a concession to party pride ; their nomination of Tom 
Watson a sop to the middle-of-the-road Cerberus, then 
counted as a very terrible monster. 

But the brains of the populist party never expected 
William Jennings Bryan to put one foot upon their plat- 



DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR VICE-PRESIDENT. 
























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THE VEBMIFORM APPENDIX. 


51 


form ; and the rank and file cared no rap whether he did,, 
or not. Both rose to him—in the face of his open letter 
to Chairman .Tones—as their refuge from syndicate-backed 
gold monometalism. Both are vindicated by their letter 
of notification. 

Leaving out here any consideration of what the pop¬ 
ulists of the West have already done, their party breth¬ 
ren in the South will cast an overwhelming majority of 
their votes for Bryan and Sewall. 

The ridiculous muddle made by the irreconcilables at 
St. Louis will neitlier live long enough, nor have strength 
enough, to prevent this certain result in November. Their 
party split is neither “so deep as a well, nor so wide as a 
barn door.” The splitters themselves do not think : “ But 
’tis enough !” 

Outside of his own state—though not with unanim- 
inity within it—the erratic Tommy Watson is measured 
very nearly at his proper number of inches. That he is 
surface-brilliant—and equally selfish—they who know him 
believe ; but they do not mean to throw away their votes, 
remain a headless organization, and risk party annihila¬ 
tion—for the sake of any tail, however meteoric. 

In some of the southern states the populist party is 
already nothing but a name. In Mississippi, for example, 
it has been so wholly wiped out and absorbed that it could 
not elect a local police justice, without practical “ fusion ” 
for some local cause. No local issue will confuse the 
presidential vote. 

In Alabama, the whole power of the populists came 
from the belief that they were first counted out; tlien 
bidden to remain out in the cold, with the doors of de¬ 
mocracy slammed in the faces of the prodigals returning. 
The astuteness of managers in the last campaign “let 
down the bars,” and invited back into the democratic 
fold all sheep that had strayed from it. As result, Gov¬ 
ernor Johnston was elected by 40,000 majority, over the 
brainiest and most unscrupulous populist, Congressman 


52 EAS1\ WEST AND SOUTH. 

Goodwin, assisted by the solid republican vote. The 
honest populites--the men who believed that silver at 10 
to 1 was the issue paramount to-day—did the business for 
the Alabama “ middle of the roadsters.” Those returned 
voters will not only stay with the state democracy. They 
will brin^ back others; and the populist masses in Ala¬ 
bama—as in all the other Southern states—will support 
the Chicago ticket, spite the most gymnastic efforts of 
the agile Tommy Watson upon his flying, trans-continental 
vice-trapeze. 

Even in his native Georgia, where Thomas-lt-Tempest 
is making the flght for his future, the democrats show no 
uneasiness. Even should the improbable contingency 
arise there, and a three-sided flght beat the democrat for 
governor, that would in nowise affect the presidental re¬ 
sult in Georgia. And it is needless to add the known 
status of Tennessee, the Carolinas, Texas and Florida ; 
wliile no thoughtful man, who knows the situation there, 
doubts Louisiana—for all Senator Caffery’s beautiful epi¬ 
taph over himself, at Indianapolis. Hanna’s love letter 
to the Negro electors was codicil to that epitaph. 

As for Mr. Bynum’s strange vaporings, from that same 
“city of the dead,” they need not be touched upon. They 
lack even the vibrance of that boy’s whistle, who tried to 
keep his courage up. Their wildness of estimate defeated 
their own intent,—if they really ever had any. Mr. 
Bynum claims the earth, where his associates formally 
announced that they do not expect one single clod. 

But even Mr. Bynum does not claim the populist vote 
for his “extra tine” gold standard. Mr. Caffery has whis¬ 
pered to him that, in his state it is nil, while ex-Tom 
.Tones and partner Faulkner cannot believe that the Ala¬ 
bama pops, “love them for the enemies they have made.” 

In sober fact those moribund respectabilities know 
that they have already dug their own graves. When 
pledging their state’s vote, the Alabamians should have 
offered also her motto: “Here we rest!” But Mark 


TIfE VERMIFORM APPENDIX. 


53 


Hfinna may fill that omission by a simple stone, cast over 
—not at—each cadaver; and bearing, in letters of j^old, 
that rare trutli in epitai)li: “Tliey died for Us ! ” 

Wlien this writer wired news of tlie Alabama election 
to western pai)ers, the Post-I)esi)atch headed the message : 
‘•As Alabama goes, so goes the Untton I” Tliis head¬ 
line truism was doul)tless based upon plain reading of tlie 
populist problem, as shown in tliat whelming result. It 
meant tliat if tlie populism of Alabjima—powerful, oi'^an- 
ized and embittered as it was—had turned to the free 
silver candidate, who stood witii botli feet upon the Clii- 
ca^o phitform—so would tlie populism of all thecountry, 
spite of little Tommy Watson, the “ Peck’s bad boy ” of 
his party. 

Not only was Alabama the first state to spe;ik to the 
Union, but Joseph F. Johnston was the llrst silver apostle 
in th(‘ democratic South. For twenty years, he had 
learned jiractical finance as politician, student and bank 
president. TTis was the first voice raised for free silver; 
and it had never uttered one doubting, or waverin^^ word. 
Yet the populists came back and voted for Johnston. 
''J’'hey will remain, and vote for Bryan and Sewall. As 
they have done in Alabama, .so will the populists do over 
the whole South. 

If chicanery and campaij^n mendacity can connect 
that result witli collusion, or alliance, between the West 
and South, they are welcome to the proceeds. Otherwise, 
let them remember that: 

“As Alabama ftoes, so^mes the Union!’’ just this once. 

That despatch, so headed, closed with the.se words :— 
“ Ifereabonts people ref^ard Tom Watson as the vermiform 
appendix of the populist ])arty : of no known use. and 
liable to sudden inflammation. Concensus of opitjion 
seems to be that the .sooner his national committee 
operates upon him, its with ‘ pletiary powers,’ the better 
for the K^eneral sanity.” 

Subsequent events, to date, show no symptoms to 


5/t 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


change this diagnosis. lion. Thomas has certainly become 
much inflamed. The sure result will be mortification 
before death. However he may discompose Dr. Marion 
Kutler, when called in consultation, the rest of the world 
takes little interest in the decomposition. 

In the West, populism seems to care for party health 
with no symptoms of appendicitis. Fusion here, accept¬ 
ance there, and little or no note of the vermiformis any¬ 
where- outside of Georgia—is the rule, proved by excep¬ 
tion. But—even should inflammation spread, and the 
Watson virus induce isolated cases of blood-poisoning— 
what then ? 

The claim, not infrequently made, that “ the popu¬ 
lists will poll 3,000,000 votes,” is absurd upon its face. It 
has not even one leg of truth to stand upon. Scarcely 
more than one-third that number were polled for General 
Weaver, in 1892; his totals footing up at 1,041,028. 

Intermediate state elections show some losses, but 
more gains; yet nothing whatever to justify an increase 
of even 50 per cent. Still, letting popular clamor “go 
behind the returns,” and allowing cent-per-cent, the total 
populist vote could never have reached 2,000,000, at most 
liberal estimate. It may be noted here that in the presi¬ 
dential election of 1892, the straight democratic vote was 
5,556,918; and the republican vote 5,176,108. 

Granting the populists their highest possible interme¬ 
diate strength—say two millions—there must still be 
deducted from that, to-day, all defections in the South, 
by returns to the democratic ranks. Of its remaining 
strength—which lies almost wholly in the West—the 
most conservative estimate gives at least three-fourths to 
the fusion, and the straight Bryan and Sewall tickets. 

Unless these deductions from official returns be 
wholly erroneous, Hon. Tommy Watson is inoculating 
party appendicitis—and subjecting himself to fatal mor¬ 
tification—for no possible expectancy of result. Even 
could he carry Georgia, with her 96,000 populist strength 
polled for Hines, in 1894, against Atkinson’s 121,000— 


THE VERMIFORM APPENDIX. 55 

which is an almost impossible contingency—it would not 
seem that the “ middle of the roadsters,” with their Wat¬ 
son appendix, could poll even twenty per cent, of the two 
million vote. 

The scheming agitator himself can never expect to be 
vice-president; unless Mr. Sewall consents to commit 
hari-kari for his saucy rival’s benefit. His party are not 
fools; and they cannot expect it. Neither, apparently, 
are they anxious—if their course in the West be sign—to 
follow the example of the Indinnapolis ghost-dancers, and 
sacrifice substance for shadow. 

As to the glib statements of some papers, that.: “ Mr. 
wSewall will be taken down, to secure the ;i,000,00()(!) of 
populist votes,” it must be noted that there is no power 
existent to take him down. Even did he come down vol¬ 
untarily, there is no power which could—in democratic 
legality—replace him on the democratic ticket. The Chi¬ 
cago convention nominated Arthur Sewall because he was 
a democrat, and because he was an Eastern man. Ttgave 
its National Committee no “ plenary powers,” as the pop¬ 
ulist convention did, to make and unmake tickets. 

But—even had the committee such power in full—it is 
wholly inconcievable that it would make the running mate 
of William Jennings Bryan a Southern democrat; the 
wildest fustian that it could dream of making him a 
Southern populist! 

This consideration of the attitude of the populist 
party is no intrusion upon their family affairs. They 
unanimously nominated our candidate for president. 
Some of them chose a candidate of their own for second 
place ; not pausing to consider their awkward—if not im¬ 
possible-position therefrom. 

Since that day, the American people have been sur¬ 
feited, early and late, with Watson wind-pudding, con¬ 
cocted and served by that ambitious spoiler of broth him¬ 
self. Tommy Watson has thrust the Hon. Thomas under 
the American nose, ad nauseam. It is his own fault—not 
that of the nose—if it now sniffs him with sheer disgust. 


be 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


Tlie populist vermiform appendix is a bad remnant, 
riiysically, mentally and politically, it measures short. 
In any li^ht its woof shows thin ; a^oiinst the jtlare of the 
calcium rellector behind it. it has no more solidity than 
a cobweb in a Roentgen ray I 

It is Tom Watson’s selfish ambition alone that has 
placed his own party in an equally ridiculous and impos-. 
sible position ; and one fatal to it if left unremedied. It 
cannot name another candidate for president, for reasons 
too many and too obvious to note. It cannot vote for 
McKinley—even indirectlu, and even if Mr. Hanna’s In¬ 
diana failure could be successfully cashed elsewhere—for 
McKinley represimts the very antipodes of everything 
which populism demands, and on which its party life 
hinges; eminently its first, great and only vital one—of 
finance. 

It cannot vote for Tommy Watson, with any remote 
hopti of making him any sort of a pn'sident. 

He will have to rest content with the mere—vice. 

He remains his party’s vermiform appendix. 


X.—THE NATURAL ALLIANCE. 

Come home to men’s business and bosoms. 

[i'Vancis Bacon. 

The South has offered one alliance to the West. 

She made the offer three decades ago; and has re¬ 
newed it with persistence and practicality ever since. 

But the West never accepted this alliance, though it 
was a business and a paying one, which promised to give 
more than it could possibly take. It was based upon the 
mutual commercial necessities of the two sections, which 
the present writer, thirty years ago, christened The Natu¬ 
ral Xlliance. 

That it has never gone beyond the suckling stage, and 
has never cut its teeth of usufruct, is because the West 
has stood, hesitant, in her own light; and all that time 
has clung to her unwritten and unnatural alliance with 
the East. But the fair progeny of Nature and commer¬ 
cial necessity will be weaned in good time; will find its 
incisors and molars gradually come through, and will 
reach the strength and stature of a trade giant. 

Drop a plumb line south from ‘Chicago, and its lead 
splashes the waters of the Gulf of Mexico in Mobile bay ! 
Along the right line thus made already run two great con¬ 
necting railways, the Illinois Central and the Mobile and 
Ohio. To-day they are carrying but a tithe of that freight¬ 
age which is their natural due, from situation and ter¬ 
minal ; but their steady, if slow, increase points the vast¬ 
ness of result sure to follow directed intelligence and 
concreted possibilities, at no distant date. 

In practically parallel line with these iron links, the 
greatest of all waterways upon the globe bisects the con¬ 
tinent-flowing South. The Mississippi has already made 



58 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 

New Orleans a great city ; will surely make her—when the 
West opens her eyes fully to her own interests—a great 
metropolis. And, in same direction as this plumb line 
and this waterway, run other great railroads that make 
the vast producing area of the entire West a network of 
steel rails, freight-bearing rivers and smaller feed streams. 

Each and every one of these pours its steady contribu¬ 
tion of supply into the few great depots of grain and meat, 
that make the West the granary and the food mart of the 
world. Tliese scattered and congested depots control and 
manipulate the entire vast outgo of food stuffs; sending 
their bulk abroad through Eastern rail lines that clog with 
its carriage, yet often ruin each other in their hot com¬ 
petition to secure it. 

Two reasons have ever obtained to produce this result; 
the dominance of Eastern capital; and, even more, that 
induration of habit, which ofttimes destroys nations. The 
West, even when protesting most loudly against the dom¬ 
ination of capital, and asserting most strongly her abso¬ 
lute sectional independence—moral, financial and commer¬ 
cial—has remained the vast truck garden and butcher-stall 
of the Atlantic ports. She has clung to an all-rail transit 
—costly, insufficient at proper seasons, and liable to block 
by natural causes ; she has paid heavy interest, on her en¬ 
tire production, to Eastern shipment; and has never 
turned her eyes practically to her God-given, and naturally 
less expensive, while ihore expansive, outlets. 

It is this strange anomaly which gives fools the basis 
for that wolf-cry—“ Over production !” The cost of trans¬ 
port, and the limited market so far reached, have at times 
made it cheaper for the West to burn her corn for fuel, 
and feed her wheat to stock than to send either to market. 
Yet, at those very times, millions of mouths in the Latin- 
American countries of our south half-continent were 
hungering for that very fuel and swine feed; for the 
rotting meat that might have gone to them with it, for 
quick and paying return. And, at those very times, the 


59 


THE NATURAL ALLIANCE. 

thinkers and progressive men of tlie South were clamoring 
loudly for Western shipments through their accessible 
and open ports. River and rail urged rates that were 
merely nominal, for the bare experiment. But no alliance 
came. Western produce still went East. 

The South stood at the open door of progress and 
called to the West to pass it and come to her. The West 
heard—went on burning grain—and answered: “ I’ll see 
you later !” Yet there is no disputing the plain tigures of 
export and import. There is no possible denial of the 
immense demand of the Central and South American 
ports for foodstuffs, by shorter and quicker, and therefore 
cheaper, line. 

There has never been offered a shadow of disproof to 
the world-known fact that Europe almost monopolizes the 
commerce of all those Southern countries, which lie 
nearest to the Southern ports of the Union ; and, through 
them, closest in distance and in time to their great 
natural granary and meat house—the West. 

There is nothing new in these facts. There may be 
no novelty in their restatement. But they are existent, 
proved and practical. In all these years, I have filled 
columns of the newspapers, pages of the industrial maga¬ 
zines, with their varied iteration ; supporting them by 
detailed tables of direct loss upon such export, and from 
waste ; and of probably greater loss in imports that must 
speedily come from short-haul interchange. 

Nor have I failed of co-laborers in this promising 
vineyard ; more known and better equipped to bring it to 
full fruition. As long ago as 1890, in his speech at the 
Reform Club banquet, in New York, Colonel Charles H. 
Jones, author of the Chicago platform, dwelt upon the 
patent facts of this alliance—existent in truth if not in 
practice. lie pointed out : “ That the democratic cam¬ 
paigns, ever since the war, had been based upon a wliolly 
unnatural alliance between New York and the Solid 
South; with New York always in the lead, and reaping 


GO EAST, WEST AND SOUTH, 

Jill the benefits of that alliance. But the natural alliance 
is between the West and the South, because of their iden¬ 
tity of pursuits and their community of interests.” 

Ex-Senator Patrick Walsh, of Georgia, is one of the 
best informed economists and closest thinkers of the 
South. He has devoted deep study to these very points, 
and to their clear elucidation for the people of the whole 
land. Moreover he was a prominent and active delegate 
at the Chicago convention. Had there been the shadow 
of foundation for this allegation of alliance there. Senator 
Walsh would, beyond question, have known of it and been 
called into it; although he was not an original Bryan 
man. Yet, in a letter to this writer, penned long subse¬ 
quent to the convention, the Georgia publicist says: 

“ I am entirely satisfied that the natural alliance of the 
South is with the West. Politically, and financially, our 
deliverance from the money power of the East will be 
wrought out, in time, by this natural alliance. Recently 
I have expressed my views, at considerable length, on 
these public questions of the day, in which the people of 
the South and West are deeply, vitally interested.” 

Had there been any question of a political alliance 
bruited at Chicago, surely these two men—from represen¬ 
tative cities of either section, would have been first to 
know it. Both of them are working to-day—as they have 
worked vainly for years—to bring about that very material 
result, which the campaign lie has claimed as achieved, 
by the nebulous pact of that convention. 

Meanwhile, the seed thus scattered broadcast upon 
the winds of thought, has not all fallen upon sterile soil. 
Here and there, sprouts have shown that may yet blossom 
into great and wide spreading utility. But confidence is a 
plant of slow growth. Even the living waters of necessity 
and the fertilizer of sectional advantage cannot cause it 
to sprout like the date-palm of the oriental sheik. 

Commercial change, like Quince the Joiner, “is slow 
of study.” Like politics, trade has neither heart nor 


THE NATVTiAL ALLIANCE. 


61 


bowels; only a maw. And it has not always—brains. 
“Needs must” is its highest moral axiom : its only other, 
“Devil take the hindmost.” 

Taking up again that map, on which the plumb line 
falls from Chicago straight into the (lulf of Mexico, let 
the thinker look eastward. Draw new lines from that food 
centre to any eastern port of the Atlantic; thence to 
Europe and back southwestward to all the South and Cen¬ 
tral American ports. Taking the plumb line as one side 
of a triangle, we find that Western product persistently 
travels over the two longest sides; avoiding the hypothe- 
nuse which gives it straighter, shorter and far cheaper car¬ 
riage. And—added to this extra first cost of haul, it is 
plain that payment travels back, over the same two sides, 
leaving its tribute of exchange, as friction-loss, cn route. 

All this is the bare plot and situation of a twice told 
tale. Iteration of its details and statistics have no place 
here; belonging only to a commercial essay. Ihit their 
basic truths alone are flat, and final, disproof that the 
West—even for improvement of her business relations, 
and for her own assured gain—had ever allied herself with 
the South. 

That she has now done so politically, yet with no 
political gain apparent;—that she has done it for the end 
of ruining those very trade facilities which she utilizes, 
in far grenter degree than the South ; and that she has 
done this with a section which was itself, in large degree, 
dependent upon the East—all this finds its own refuta¬ 
tion in its bare statement. 

There is—and I regret to write the words—no sort of 
alliance existent to-day between the West and the South. 
That there will be one, I believe with Colonel Jones, 
Senator Walsh, and many another publicist of either sec¬ 
tion, who looks beyond the end of his own nose. 

Dut when the pact does come, it will have been wrung 
out of the richer section’s commercial need, through the 


C2 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


tightening pressure of the British octopus, that has its 
tentacles fastened upon tlie West’s production and lier 
greater possibilities. 

When it is signed, the pact will have deeper and more 
practical basis than any trade in votes, or any possible 
outcome from such trade. It will not be born of politics, 
or of parties, but will prove its heritage as the lawful 
issue of common sense and opportunity. It will be found 
no temporary junta, but tlie great muniiicent and everlast¬ 
ing Natural Alliance. 



XL—THE EAST I^ THE SOUTH. 

Oft e\pcctation fails, wiiere most it promises. 

[.As You Like It. 

Habit may j,n-ow stron^mr than principle. 

reiiiaps only selfishness is stronger than habit. 

It was the cynic who said: “ Man is a creature of tiie 
iioiir; ” but lie was a philosopher who answered : “Yes ; 
of the dinner hour.” 

The South has always been promiit to her dining, but 
has often missed her menu for the meal. For that, the 
habit and the selfishness of the South of yesterday com¬ 
bined to keep her in actual, if not formulated, alliance 
with the East. Neither habit, selfishness nor principle 
can be shown as foundation for her nebulous alliance 
with the West, as against the East. 

If these pages hold one grain each of fact and of logic, 
both combine to prove wherein the usefulness of the East 
has been confessed—and succumbed to—by the South, for 
over half a century. In all that time there shows neither 
debt, advantage, nor favor for which the West has laid her 
Southern sister under compliment. 

In political matters, neither nominations or election 
returns record cases where this section has been preferred 
by her younger sister nearer sunset. In barter and trade, 
which draw populations—however much the oue may ad¬ 
vantage over the other—there has been but little. In in¬ 
vestment, for which the empty South had hungered with 
convalescent appetite, there was but nominal showing, as 
against the heavy offerings from the East; and that little 
was largely in timber lands—which are held idle and un¬ 
productive, to await further denuding of more northern 
forests. 


61^ 


BA^1\ WEST AND SOUTH. 


Tn valuable population, the South did make large gain, 
principally in her gardening interests ; but this was main¬ 
ly due to the unceasing, intelligent and liberal work of 
some of her trunk railroads. Yet this reticence of inter¬ 
communication, as already shown, was in the face of the 
fact that both populations were agricultural, though in 
different and non-interfering lines; and that every natu¬ 
ral advantage to the trade and profit of the one, would be 
largely enhanced by the recuperative progress of the other. 

Truly said Sir Edward Coke: “Corporations cannot 
commit treason, nor bo outlawed, or excommunicated, for 
they have no souls.” IS^either has business; nor bowels, 
or sentiment. It luis not always—brains. The section 
that vaunts her pretended philanthropy to another is a 
sham. Her claim must be as transparent as Mr. Mark 
Hanna’s late-born anxiety for the wcdfare of the laboring 
classes. 

So the South was never bound to the West by those 
ties of active interest which alone breed inter-sectional 
sentiment. She merely held in abeyance those vastly 
greater prospective ties—which the mnp and the experi¬ 
ence of other nations alike showed—and turned her eyes 
Eastward. There she found acceptance for prolTered 
facts. It is to tin; credit of that canny section that she 
misses few opportunities. Whenever she sees the head 
on a dollar, in the business wake, she hits it. 

She sent her substance into the prostrate and denuded 
South; developed her mining and manufacturing re¬ 
sources to the extent, at least, of test. Naturally her 
money centering drew all exchange -and with it all profit 
—to her coffers. But in none of this did she refute the 
philosophy of Coke, by proving an overplus of soul. Slie 
saw her opportunity and advantaged herself by it; thus 
advantaging, to an extent, those who made her own profit 
possible. But there had never been claim that this was 
philanthropy, or sentiment—far less that the South was a 


THE EAST IN THE SOUTH. 


65 


base ingrate for declining some articles of the Eastern 
political creed—until republican thimble-riggery found it 
paying to put the pea under our thimble. 

It was accepted fact that the weaker and poorer sec¬ 
tion had received benefit from the stronger and richer 
one; and that she had made ample return in kind. Ihit 
it was never conjectured that the purchase of cotton and 
exchange would be stretched to cover, as lagniappe, the 
purchase of the beliefs, wills and consciences of the 
smaller dealer. 

The vast and rapid material advance of the South— 
once reconstruction was in reality begun; her steady rise 
in wealth, from the actual zero-point of the peace; her 
regular stride toward central importance in the financial 
and commercial scheme of the Union, absorbed all the 
thought of her people. These things diverted it from any 
careful analysis of conditions—especially of political ones. 
As 1 have said elsewhere, the masses of the South were 
then eating to live. They had no time for the more 
pleasant problem of living to eat. That they let their 
leaders do for them; and, for a time, they took their 
opinions and their policies from the stock-made lots 
offered ‘‘at first cost.” When they found time to think 
for themselves, the Southern masses turned those leaders 
down, with a unanimity only equalled by its despatch. 

This is the simply stated truth of the political ati- 
tude, not only of the Cotton States, but of the entire 
South, for long years following the civil war. Whatever 
may have been its wisdom—or its necessity—under former 
conditions, neither is now existent. A political Solid 
South became an anomaly, so soon as a materially re¬ 
constructed South could declare her business independence, 
and force its recognition from the practical and commer¬ 
cial East and West. 

As conditions grew easier, men began to think for 
themselves, rather than be thought for by self-appointed 
leaders. The innate spirit of independence and fair play, 
which made the “ Boston tea party ” possible and the civil 


66 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


war a logical sequence—asserted itself; and the lately led 
at last began to lead. The earliest fruit of this new- 
budded thought was query of the relation of the South to 
the East: why a people so essential to the very making of 
the political pie—and certainly very necessary “ shorten¬ 
ing ” to its business crust—should not have at least one 
finger in it. 

But more meaning and important result of this 
awakening of the long inert masses was seen in the uni¬ 
versal adoption of silver sentiment by the laboring and 
small-dealer classes of this entire section. The pros and 
cons of finance it is no intent of this book to discuss. But 
the fact is as patent as existent, that all the alleged 
“ leaders ” of Southern opinion were for the gold standard. 
Yet the masses—thinking for themselves—began to lead 
themselves; and, as ever, the “‘leaders” followed. For 
politics is “ a corporation’’—according to Coke; and, so 
being, has no soul. 

When the South thus thought for herself, and openly 
expressed her conclusion, she naturally ceased letting the 
East think for her. In simple fact, she probably did not 
cai*e a rap what the East might think upon the question ; 
and, it must be remembered, that section had not yet 
spoken her views. It was natural to suppose that, being 
a manufacturer, she would be for protection ; that, being 
a money centre, and finding gain in foreign connection, 
she would be for the foreign money standard—however 
that might affect the pockets of her sister sections. 

The South, if she thought about the matter, probably 
considered that the East’s own business; conceding her 
the perfect right to her own views and theories, and to 
their full and free expression. But, naturally she ex¬ 
pected to have her own right, in both regards, recognized 
and respected. Knowing, she was ready to maintain them 
to the full extent of her capacity. 

But the great mistake that the East, and her over- 
zealous allies elsewhere, have made is to believe that a 
trade in staples was a trade in principles ; that an invest- 


THE EAST IN THE SOUTH 


67 


merit in mineral beds and timber lands and spindles, car¬ 
ried with it as usufruct the brains, conscience and princi¬ 
ples of the second parties to it. Eastern jxold buj^s, their 
press and their bought adherents in the South foam over 
the cairn and universal decision of the Southern States, 
on a question of politics and economy, as though it were 
treasonable to the other section. They know of no agree¬ 
ment, trade, or compact by which the South is bound to 
follow the Eastern lead; or which forbidsherto “commit 
suicide,” or to “revel in a wild craze,” if she so elect. 
Yqt she is berated in printed arguments and appeals; is 
ranted at by paid hirelings from the rostrum; and is treat¬ 
ed to political homilies, with frequency and bitterness, in 
business correspondence. 

In all candor, it is the South's own fault that her sis¬ 
ter section thus feels towards her. She has so long neg- 
lect^'d her own opportunities for self-assertion ; she has so 
long played the roll of the patient political handmaiden, 
and material hewer of wood and drawer of water, as to 
give the East quasi ownership of her conscience and her 
ballots, as well as of her till. And the sudden uprise of 
a thought-revolt from this end produces a surprise that- 
coupled with possibly non-remunerativeresults—ferments 
and produces acid in the Eastern mind. 

That this idea of Southern folly and insincerity—if no 
worse—is honestly indulged by even the well-meaning 
and thoughtful men of the East is not improbable. The 
writer’s ])ersonal correspondence proves this, in some 
cases. One old and valued friend—himself long resident 
in the South, and an earnest promoter of many large plans 
for her advancement—now manages an important New 
York enterprise. In regard to a statement I sent him as 
to a European investment, just prior to the Chicago con¬ 
vention, he wrote : 

“I do not believe it. I do not believe that any bonds 
of enterprises in the United States will be placed—and 
particularly in states whose citizens have become de¬ 
mented on the silver question—until after the election. 


G8 EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 

I think I have shown an affectionate regard for the inter¬ 
ests of the South. I suffered under its reconstruction. I 
have done some work to prevent the republicans getting 
control of the country, so as to put a force measure 
upon the South that would prove more obnoxious than 
even reconstruction. 

“And the South stands a fair chance of securing anew 
force hill—and Negro rule following the succefis of the Bepiihlican 
party—ivhich will he asmred beyond (luestion, \f as I ijresume 
will be sure, the Chicago convention adopts a silver 
platform!” 

There is a grave and serious fear—honestly expressed 
in the lines here italicized : but it is not the fear of results 
from any Southern combine. The man who writes thus 
is one of the best types of that class, noted in the chapter 
on reconstruction. A gallant federal soldier and a demo¬ 
crat, he came south after the surrender ; at once arraying 
himself on the side of white supremacy and home rule. 
Another valued friend—a clear headed republican—but 
always an ardent supporter of Mr. Cleveland and his 
policy—edits the leading independent paper of the richest 
and greatest republican city of this Union. On a mere 
journalistic matter, he wrote about the same time : 

“It would be worse than idle to undertake to write 
articles to attract attention in the North, at the present 
time, presenting the advantages of industrial develop¬ 
ment in the South. I would be very glad to publish such 
articles when they would do good, but just now they 
would not; and, until there is some confidence in the 
financial integritry of the Southern States, nothing could 
induce capital from any country—either North, or abroad 
—to go into the Southern States. I know how well you 
are equipped for such work, and I hope the time may soon 
come when such articles can be used to advantage.” 

It is needless here to give the disproof, at hand, of 
this deduction. The quotations are given merely to show 
the sentiment towards the South that, at this moment, 
rules the East, and of which these writers are merely the 
reflex. 


THE EAST IN THE SOUTH. 


69 


This sentiment, and these letters, prove beyond ques¬ 
tion that it is the East which has leaj^ued against the 
South ; not the latter against the former—either with the 
West, or otherwise. 

The money sentiment is ready to try on us the “ freez¬ 
ing-out” process. She would, if she could, draw about 
the South—and probably about the West as well—the 
stranglitig cordon of a money-blockade. Her bond deals 
and gold contracts are part of a system of constriction; 
expected to squeeze the thought-rebellious South back 
into pocket-loyalty. 

Plainly the range is false, and the carefully prepared 
shot will fall short. Thesection that fires it to-day, amid 
hurrahs and confident exultation, will watch the rebound 
with chagrin and dismay. It is merely another point in 
the purchase game ; and it will lose, with the rest. The 
East will find that she has done that very thing which the 
South would avoid, by avoiding “ alliances.” She will 
have cut her own nose, to the spiting of her own face. 
She cannot impoverish the rest of this Union, if she would. 
Could she do so, her own cai)acious pockets would deplete 
in the process; save where they were the mere transit- 
bags of foreign money lenders. 

It is not credible that the East can do without the 
product and the trade of the South ; nor that she herself 
believes that she can. She is merely playing a big hand 
in “ the national game,” and is only “blufling.” 

P>ut could she—and did she—make the serious attempt 
at such trade “cordon,” it would at worst be a mere verbal 
blockade. And the East may recall that the then unpro¬ 
ductive and seemingly dependent South lived—and re¬ 
acted from—four years of idleness, with her ports hermet¬ 
ically sealed and her entire inland border pinned close by 
bayonets. 

And still tlie interesting fact remains, 

that it is the East which is making this combine—not the 
South. 


Xll.—THE BRITISH OCTOPUS. 

You take my life, 

When you do take the means whereby 1 live. 

[ Merchant of Venice. 

Dibdin’s “right little, tight little island” is the real 
octopod. 

Her tentacles fasten to the Poles and the Equator. 
Once fixed they squeeze for interest only; and their re¬ 
lentless suction never loosens. 

That the sun never sets upon the British empire is a 
boast. That British finance works twenty-four hours 
every day—and three hundred and sixty-six days each 
year—is a fact. 

Progress is nature. Nature ever finds growth out of 
destruction. The government that does not base its 
every policy upon selfish interest—that does not apply in 
practice the dictum (luoted from Sir Edward Coke— 
shortens its boundaries and loses its moral and commer¬ 
cial weight in the scheme of the nations. 

Neither history nor business criticism will hereafter 
declare the selfishness of British policy aught but natural 
and proper—for her. But both will sit down with due 
severity upon those other nations; which, having ample 
power to be free, still bend abject necks to the British 
yoke and become its mere beasts of burden. 

And especially is this the undeniable attitude, for 
many a decade past, of this continent; our northern half 
of which loudly vaunts itself to be “ The land of the free 
and the home of the brave.” Indeed, he is liable to be 
dubbed a traitorous in grate, who dares to record the 
proved truth that the North American Union—equally 



GARRETT A. HOBART 


REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR VICE-PRESIDENT. 










THE BRlTltHI OCTOPUS. 


71 


with its South American sister—is the unpaid slave of 
British selfishness, and the victim of its own commercial 
cowardice I 

Space permits few details, and forbids all statistics of 
the Latin American trade with Europe ; but both rise up 
spontaneously before any thought brought to bear upon 
this all-important theme. It may amaze many an easy- 
goer at the West to read what the East already knows : 
that the annual trade of the Central and Southern Amer¬ 
icas foots up over $3,000,000,000. And the vast bulk of 
this is bought from England and paid for, in part by ex¬ 
ports, but far more largely in cash. 

Yet of all this enormous sum, the natural and logical 
supply depot of these countries, the United States, does 
less than two-flfths of the main supply ; and, in some ar¬ 
ticles which we produce and handle, does none at all. The 
food, clothing, furniture, coal and minor necessaries im¬ 
ported into Latin-American ports, come almost wholly in 
Ilritish bottoms from British ports: Germany and France 
doing a fraction of it, but still leaving the world’s carrier 
as the world’s octopus. 

The map of the continents—especially the map of 
America—and the open statistics of European trade with 
those ports, tell a tale as plain as astounding, of their vast 
gain to England, and of immense and needless loss to the 
United States. The facts unfold themselves ; too plainly 
to demand discussion, too clearly for disproof. 

And, palpably, with the trade goes the financial bal¬ 
ance of millions of dollars of annual loss. This goes to the 
South. Upon its return imports rest millions of annual 
gain. This goes to England. The congestion caused by 
the constricting tentacles of the octopus keeps Western 
grain and meat at home; makes possible the burning of 
grain and its feeding to stock. This loss is shouldered by 
the West. 

Then the usufruct on great imports of coffee, fruits, sisal 
and other tropical products—all largely demanded all over 
this country, and eagerly seeking Western markets—ag- 


7S 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


gregates millions more of annual loss. This is divided be¬ 
tween the West and the South directly; hut indirectly by 
the East, for the more prosperous both become the more 
profitable customers they prove to the East. 

On the other hand, all the gain that results from the 
ridiculously small trade Ihe West with the Latin- 
Americas pays the East lii-ectly, in exchange, handling, 
freights and shipping charges. But this is nominal, com¬ 
pared to the vast profit that would result to the common 
country, from direct inter-continental interchange over 
the shortest, most direct and cheapest lines—Nature’s 
own lines-which will yet come. 

Again taking the world’s map, and noting the lines 
traced upon it in tlie chapter on thd Natural Alliance, 
the triangulation of trade speaks more strongly for itself. 
The hypothenuse is the natural line; shorter in distance 
and in time, and therefore cheaper both for importer 
and for exporter. Applying the scale to that triangle, 
proof comes that—for their entire food and household 
supplies—the Latin-American ports can save money, time 
and damage loss, by shipments to them from the West, 
through the hlastern Atlantic ports; and still more by 
those of the Gulf of Mexico. It proves that the return 
profit is quicker, and loses less by the friction of passage 
over two sides of the triangle, as against one. 

Just here it may be wcdl to glance at a few compara¬ 
tive distances. From Chicago to New York is 897 miles; 
to Mobile—-taken as a central Gulf port—it is 857 miles. 
From Kansas City to New York. 1,303 miles : to Mobile, 
821. From St. Louis to New A'ork, 1,050 miles : to Mobile, 
614. These are samples of long-haul transit for home 
product to the sea; but they cover the largest produce 
depots and manufacturing cities of the West. 

From Mexico, take Tampico and Vera Cruz, 2,100 
miles from New York and 700 from Mobile ; Coatzacoalcos, 
2,300 miles to New A"ork, 772 to Mobile; Campeche and 
Progresso, 1,700 against 668. Belize, British Honduras, is 
2,360 from New York; 875 from Mobile; and the Guata- 


THE BRITISH OCTOPUS. 


73 


mala ports, Livingston and Puerto Barrios, are 2.300 miles 
from New York, and 1,000 from Mobile. Similar ratio 
holds for Spanish Honduras and Costa Rica, Nicaragua 
and Columbia. 

If these figures do not speak for themselves, then is 
commercial arithmetic dumb. The thinker, producer, 
manufacturer, or importer has only to add to them the 
outer lines of triangular trade—drawn to Europe and back 
to the Gulf—to see the answer, with the minus sign, 
clearly for himself. 

Still the clutcli of the octopus holds—vspite of West¬ 
ern loss and of Southern appeal to national common sense. 
The tireless finance of the empire, which adds one day to 
every year by knowing no sunset, dominates American 
commercial methods, to Americati loss of annual millions. 
The plain propositions of to-day are left to rust in the 
usages of yesterday, solely because the money centres of 
this country are the mere agencies of another country. 

Our Declaration of Independence needs amendment 
far more than ever did the Constitution. Both instru¬ 
ments—as this pamphlet premised—were framed by The 
Fathers, wise in their generation. Since then, new 
growth and new needs born of them, have generated de¬ 
mand for new systems. The Declaration might well be 
changed, by having the words ‘“Financially and commer¬ 
cially” inserted before the words “Free and equal.” 

Until such practical “amendment” is made. Bunker 
Hill and New Orleans were fought in vain. Until then 
we will remain the mere commercial and financial de¬ 
pendency of the Octopod Empire, with her gold-liveried 
viceroy sitting autocratic on his Wall street throne—sent 
out from Lombard street. 

Until then, we have no right to our much sung Flag 
of vaunted freedom ; for the North and South American 
Unions are practically as much provinces of the British 
Empire—while far less expensive ones, because self-main¬ 
taining—as is the Dominion of Canada ! 

In view of these plain—and nowise new—trade truths. 


EAST, WEST AND SOUTH. 


74 

it is not strange that tiie keen and grasping foresight of 
the older country should be loth indeed to remove its suc¬ 
tion-clutch upon the financial system of the younger. It 
is plain why the victory of the single gold standard is very 
close to the heart—or to the pouch, which is the same 
thing—of the octopod. It is simple that infiuence, dicta¬ 
tion and even hard money can be lavishly spent, and to a 
profit, to prevent the changing of new lamps for this po¬ 
tent old Aladdin’s illuminator. It is now comprehensible 
why the mother government could consent without pro¬ 
test, even to lose lion. Bourke Cockran, for a time, from 
his parliament-in-law. 

But what must be equally plain is that the masses of 
American voters are just beginning to think of—or to re¬ 
alize, in any sense—the real and the vast meaning to 
themselves of the dominance of British thought and of 
British gold over their own best interets, national and in¬ 
dividual. And the wider that this newly-wakened thought 
opens its eyes, the more clearly will it read this unwritten 
axiom: 

Tlie nation that wears the collar of vicarious com¬ 
merce, must ever fasten it about its neck with a borrowed 
gold button ! 

That Natural Alliance in trade for which John T. 
Morgan, Senor Romero, Patrick Walsh, Alex. K. McClure, 
Charles II. Jones, Clark Howell and many another have 
labored for years, will surely come. It will be an alliance 
of the West and the South; not against the East, but 
in aid of the East—of the Latin Americas, and of universal 
trade freedom. ' 

With its birth—and not until its birth, will come that 
talisman of self-help, which alone can prove potent to un¬ 
fix the tentacles of the British octopus. 


XIII.—4r THE PHANTOI^ PARTY. 

He knoweth not that the dead are tliere; and that her guests are in 
the depths of hell [Proverbs ix —18. 

In social matters, the “phantom party” is a mystily- 
ini? function. 

In political matters, it is presumably less so; thou^^h 
no less amusing to non-participants. 

The recent “most respectable gathering,” at Indian¬ 
apolis, was a phantom party in every aspect save one. It 
was not amusing to anyone; only provocative of mild pity. 
The defunct and sheeted respectabilities who made iheir 
unsubstantial ghost-dance there, had once been live and 
useful and respected members of the party that must now 
sadly but quietly bury them. 

There were the shades of the men, on both sides of 
the sup]K)sititious Mason and Dixon’s line, who made the 
war between the states. Part of them were the ghosts of 
those who had later made, and kept, the Solid South, A 
few of them were the remains of men who had tried to 
make that the “ New South.” They were the ghostly tail 
of the democratic dog, essaying to wag the live beast, 
even while dissevering themselves from it. But, coming to 
the “dance of death” political, from East, or North, or 
South, they were cadavers all. 

They talked a sepulchral ax post facto tongue ; they 
windily patted each other’s unsubstantial backs; they 
“ walked a measure weird and dark,” and then went home 
to their several graves; all with despatch perhaps un¬ 
seemly in ancient and “most respectable” ghosts. 

As for these, anything but, “merry maskers,” though 
they have stolen the vizors of heaven to dance with the 
devil in, “ let them go in peace ! ” For, as the gods make 


76 EAST, WEST AND SOUTH 

mad them they would destroy, these be indeed mad ghosts, 
who prance in unseemly antics, under the gauzy slieeting 
of a filched name. There is no one thing “National” 
about them ; they are, in no sense, “ Democrats.” 

They gibber insane twaddle about “party honor,” 
even while vainly attempting to dishonor their old—and 
only—party. They croon a doleful chant about safety of 
their sections, while they tenderly rock the cradle of a 
suckling force bill I They are not national, because they 
represent only minority discontent in dissevered localities. 
They are not democrats, because they abrogate democ¬ 
racy’s basic law, the will of the majority. They do not 
even put up pretense that the Chicago convention was not 
the regular and lawful one of the democratic party—both 
in its membership and its proceedings. Their quarrel with 
it is that it did not follow their effete modes of thought, 
remain the tail of the dog, and wag in rythm to their own 
peculiar personal pocket interests. Alas ! poor ghosts ! 

They clutched eagerly at one statement of that con¬ 
vention’s candidate—made a year before he ever dreamed 
himself its possibility. As a private citizen he said he 
would not vote for a gold nominee of the convention. This 
was, then, high treason in ghostland. Now, they have put 
up a new man—a man of straw ; an alias—to vote for, 
against the party’s regular, and unanimous, nominee. Il¬ 
logical ghosts ! 

This is not amusing, because it is pitiful. It were in¬ 
deed weakness to be wroth with weakness. This handful 
ghost of real “ National Democracy ” is aught but danger¬ 
ous. It cannot be so even to itself, for it is dead. As tart 
Alex. Stephens used to say : “ It died a-borning ; an 

eminently “respectable,” aristocratic and titled corpse— 

Doomed for a certain term to walk the niglit, 

yet only nominis mnhra to the end. 

With all its Generals and Colonels and ITonorables— 
not forgetting its big, big Brass Band and its gold-laced 
uniforms,—this corporal’s-guard army of the dead has 


AT THE PHANTOM PAJiTY. 


77 


fewer soldiers than tlie live one of the Grande Duchesse of 
Gerolstein, in the opera boiiffe. Tliere, at least, were 
Private Fritz and Private Schwartz ! 

In the li^lit between living’ men, now corning so near, 
the ghost ranks will cut no figure. The solid living ones 
clashing tf)gether will march through, without even feel¬ 
ing them. Everyone of the defunct Generals and Colonels 
may cast his own shadowy vote for McKinley—or an alias. 
Not one of them all will cast any vote soever but his own. 

Their sole result upon the real issue—like that of 
Hanna’s gross pecuniosity, or his Hiberno-Hessian’s 
l)Oomerang flipp;incy, or the. yell of Yale’s hoodlumism— 
will be as an olyject lesson. They, too, array the classes' 
against the masses ; the centralized money power, which 
in life they venerated, against the popular will. 

This phantom party claim to be too good republicans 
to vote for the candidate of the people; that he is a popu¬ 
list because he voted for Weaver, to prevent a sure Harri¬ 
son victory. Hut they claim to be too good democrats not 
to vote for McKinley, or an alias! 

And to do this, the Indianapolis ghost dancers de¬ 
liberately and knowingly made an alliance of the East 
and South and North aLOiinsi tlie West! 

There is one “most respectable” point about the 
phantom dancing party, at Indianapolis. Its sheeted 
functionaries did not sell themselves—for cash. They 
forced Mark Hanna to ru) mistake, like that in Indiana. 
They were, as has been said, so openly eager to give them¬ 
selves away, that they knew McKinley’s carrier of the 
bag—knowing that—would not cry for a bid oii them. If 
they have, or had, “aspirations if they s;iw prospective 
pap, dribbling from the treasury into little golden sou¬ 
venir spoons, that hope has fled from the “National” 
cemetery. McKinley’s man’s master has laid all causes 
disquieting to political spooks, by turning his broad back 
full upon the Lily Whites, taking Quashee Cuffee to his 
opulent shirt front, and saying in effect—“D—n the bolt¬ 
ing white man, anyway !” 


18 


EA81\ WEST AND SOUTH. . 

So tlie saltatory spooks of the phantom party liave 
only set up a funereal dolls house. They have taken their 
jxraveyarrl toy ballots and gone to play in McKinley's yard, 
at the griesly game of “Palmer, peek-a-boo!” They are 
solemnly playing at committees and electors, a ticket and 
ballots. Fie, silly ghosts ! 

In all honesty and seriousness this irregular proceed¬ 
ing is a bald and barren sham. That it can do no possible 
good to itself, or to anything else, is a foregone conclusion 
and already so accepted. That it can do any sort of harm, 
to any but its instigators in Markhannaland, is equally 
sure. 

Those l)oth-sides-of-the-road democrats who compose 
it are simply inscrutable. They voted for the silver state 
tickets in their homes, knowing that the men they thus 
elected were standing with both feet upon a silver plank, 
in a sifver platform. Then they deliberately walked out 
of “the house of our fathers,” with ostrich sagacity of 
belief that they were carrying the house with them. 
“Where they are—at,” now, no man can tell. They 
claim that they will patch and repaint the house, keep it 
empty for a tenant for four years, and then put up a 
placard : “None but our sort of democrats need apply.” 
Put somehow they haven’t carried the house away, and 
the party in possession declines to vacate. The ostrich 
policy did not work. 

In simple justice, it should be remembered that some 
of these men—however mistaken—were honest in their 
conviction that they had only to step out, whistle to it, 
and “ the house of our fathers” would trundle along after 
them. They would not have voted the democratic ticket 
anyway, in the face of their own loud and bitter denun-, 
elation of Mr. Bryan’s reply to Judge Brame’s hot query. 
They would have stayed at home ; thus giving McKinley 
one-half of a vote, each. Now they will give a whole vote 
each to their straw candidate; thus taking that many 
half votes from McKinley. To them will rally a still 
smaller fraction of alleged democrats, who would have 


AT THE PHANTOM PAITTY. 


79 

plunipecl for Mark TIanna’s ticket, in any event. This 
will detract—directly and still further—from McKinley’s 
vote. 

As against this subtraction, the very vulgar fraction 
of weak-spined democrats—who had decided to stand by 
the Chicago ticket, but will change to McKinley, or an 
alias—is scarcely nominal. What strength the alleged 
Palmer-Buckner ticket may show will detract from the 
presumable McKinley ‘'democratic” vote, in infinite 
ratio to any loss it can inflict on the true democratic 
Bryan strength. 

This is the bare truth, everywhere in the South. It 
is the cold fact, in the West. Parity of reasoning will 
doubtless show it the truth, even in the East; save with 
such democracy there as “ is built to sell.” And that it is 
the truth, none realizes better than the master of Mark’s 
man himself. He chuckled over the Indianapolis phantom 
party. Since that grave gave up its dead, the chuckle has 
ceased ; the oily grin has become a very dry one. Mark 
Hanna sees the bare, cold facts condensed into this para¬ 
graph. He is giving the graveyard ticket the coldest of 
cold shoulders. No “ fat ” fries for it, “ even to the poor 
part of one little scruple.” He embraces the negro and the 
hoodlum heeler; but he puts on ice any comfort for the 
sheeted dead of the “ National ” spook party. It is plain 
that he would like to take the alleged ticket down ; but, 
like the maker of the Frankenstein, he has brought to life 
an epicene master beyond his pudgy powers to control. 

There is good reason to expect that, in some states, 
the ghost of democracy will loom “ in the dark o’ the 
moon ” until November; and then stalk lonesome to the 
polls—to the sore discomfort of Mark, and the certain in¬ 
jury of his man. 

But this monstrous hybrid of a party is unique. It is 
built after the Beast of the Apocalypse ; a gruesome body 
with a head of gold monometallism, and feet of protection. 


so EAS1\ WEST AND SOUTH, 

The feet it strives to drape with the mantle of oratory ; 
but it proves only a pall—rent and all too short, and the 
ugly pedals are visible to all men. 

And wherein is the gain forall this ado about nothing? 
It is yet too early to tell if the deliberate renders of old 
ties will ever be able to patch them—and hide the seams— 
in all the future. That they will get nothing, in hand, is 
now sure. Still more certain is it—should Mark Hanna be 
elected president -that his man will have no pap left for 
bolters. He has said so to Louisiana—where the bolters 
were of his “ father’s house.” 

He did not say that—or anything else—to the South¬ 
ern “ leaders,” who lately waited at his door. He would 
not “see” them. He would say nothing. They did not 
find his silence golden. 

But, in the South, the Hannacrats do not need his 
money—which they will not get. Their squad is made up 
of gold-laced volunteer aides, who furnish their own side 
arms and rank-marks. They have no ammunition ; but 
they only mean to fire blanks; a funeral salute over their 
own graves. 

Were the theme not so sad a one as to make mirth 
unseemly, it might recall the story of Swiss politics. The 
Alpine republic has ever had two parties; the radical 
Reds and the conservative Blues. An ardent member of 
the latter said, rather hopelessly : 

“ There is but one way to get rid of these Reds. Turn 
the world over, and drop them into space !” 

“ But then,” objected his hearer, “that would destroy 
us also.” 

“Ah ! my friend,” answered the loyal Blue—“but we 
must make sacrifices!” 

Tor what is it that the phantom party is making its 
sacrilice, and plunging into space? Alas! poor ghost! 


XIY.—TORIES AJSD HESSIANS. 

Tory: One who favored the claims of Great P.ritain against the 
Colonies; an adherent of the Crown. [Webster's Dictionary. 

• Wide divergence often reaches similar result. 

There is doubtless some difference in the manner— 
while very little in the fact—between men in politics who 
sell themselves, or give themselves away. 

“Anything to beat Bryan” is the point to which the 
purchased Hessians and the cajoled and manipulated 
bolters alike trend. That is “the be-all and the end all” 
of their hot platitudinosity; but the Tory and the Hes¬ 
sian will go down the back stairs of history, hand-in-hand. 

The ex-Hon. Bourke Cockran, immediately upon his 
yellow conversion by coin, took the infant campaign lie to 
the nursery of his capacious mouth. To carry it through 
its risky teething stage, he used the nostrums of stale- 
political quackery and the dangerous stimulant of sec¬ 
tional hate. Very brief test has shown that its weak 
stomach cannot stand such drastic treatment; and Mark 
Hanna’s hired quack has come nearer killing the hopeful 
infant of mendacity, than anything that has happed 
since its illegitimate birth. 

The Cockran and Carl Schurz species are perennially 
in evidence. Both of these political X-rays have long 
proved that they can shine with equal candle-power on 
either side of any question ; if need be, on both sides at 
once. But their own bones and articulations have too 
long been plain to the national gaze, to have even the 
savor of curious interest for the public of to-day. 

It were needless to repeat here the record of this 
precious pair. Arcades amho, these are too familiar to 
that American public—which both profess to despise — 


8B ^:as'i\ w:est and south. 

even liad the press, on both sides, not revolted at their 
too-swift zeal and held them up afresh for exhibition. 
Tlieir stock in trade is wind, and the flapping in it of the 
old time “bloody shirt.” I»ut that lately ensanguined 
garment has been faded colorless by the heat of many a 
past fray; and the storms of ancient conflict have left it 
rent and tattered to its very edge. So the Hessian feature 
of Mark Hanna’s political reformation may be dismissed 
to that limbo of forgotten things, which its own reaction 
has already made for it. 

But the Hessians carried with them none of that odor 
of sanctity, which permeates the lean air about the classic, 
venerated and “most respectable” %>ersonnel of the Tory 
wing of General Hanna’s allied army. That is nothing— 
if not respectable; and that Falstaff could never have 
chuckled about it; 

“A mad fellow met me on the way, and told me T had 
unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the dead bodies. 
1*11 not march through Coventry with them, that’s flat: 
nay, and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if 
they had gyves on. There’s but a shirt and a half in all 
my company!” 

In very truth the Tory wing is almost all shirt, and it 
largely runs to ruffles—and collar. 

But in their common aim at hitting the black of the 
McKinley target, the Hessians have the best of the Tories. 
They at least get the boodle, making them the liver¬ 
wing ; while all the necks and picked bones are kept for 
their allies, making them truly the left wing. Being 
openly for sale, the Hessians get their price ; thus having 
all the logic—if none of the respectability. 

The Tories—being defunct, and very mad ghosts— 
gibber ceaselessly about “honor” and loyalty to party ; 
but it is probable that they do not stand before the mir¬ 
ror of public opinion, and study their own reflections. 
They may train into party parrots, even though they 
began repeating republican doctrine, when their feathers 
were dropping and their beaks wore hacked by age. 


TORIES AND HESSIANS, 


S3 


Perclied on Hanna's fin^^er, they may cry : “ Didn’t Rryan 
say he wouldn’t vote for the party candidate? Bad Bryan ! 
Look at Boll! Pretty Poll !” 

But they will never get the cracker. 

The Tory contention now is that the Chicago platform 
is not democratic; but their creed heretofore luis ever 
been that its convention was the only party power; its 
platform the only party law. Out of their own mouths— 
by the testimony of all their past—they stand convicted 
as party law-breakers. They deny nothing of the legality 
of the Chicago convention ; of its credentials and regular 
form; f)f its adoption of candidates by a majority simply 
overwhelming. They do not claim that the party law— 
government by the majority—was ever infracted ; that 
p:irty usage of the two-thirds rule, which grew to una¬ 
nimity, was ever departed from. 

Neither the hyper-sanguine Bynum, the llower- 
s])routing Caffery, blunt, truth-telling old Bragg—not even 
resonant Thomas G. Jones—has claimed aught of party 
infraction. They only repeat that the party has gone 
away from them. They forget that they went away from 
the party, when they followed Grover Cleveland into the 
republican camp, at the beck of rare John Sherman. So, 
nominally skirting the sheol of republicanism, these Tories 
take a few burned-out matches and a pinch of Hanna 
sulphur, make a little imitation hell of their own and call 
it—The Party ! 

They commit, Jn act and precept, the .sole and only 
political crime they have ever laid to the charge of the 
Ik'ople’s Man : non-conformity to convention nomination. 
7<V/.s est ah haste doceri; but they make it vile by voting 
for Mark Hanna’s man—or an alias. See their great apos¬ 
tle of toryism : him at whose nod they have all been quick 
to bow 

.'Vnd crook the pi-egnant hinges of the knee, 

Where thrift may follow fawning. 

Yet, Grover Cleveland .said : “ Never will I vole for Mc- 
Kinlen, Never will I vote the republican ticket, or for any man, 
even my brother, who might be named thereon.’^ 


8J^ EAST, WEST AED SOUTH. 

And so saying, lie sat remote and solitary at Buzzard’s 
Bay, only rising to execute a shadowy pas seul over the 
toppling fragment of his party; sending its spirit photo¬ 
graph to the secondary ghost dance at Louisville. 

One may marvel whether the president’s oath draws 
his curtain in the dead of night and tells him that his 
Troy is burned; whether it plays about his bob and makes 
his catch all conscience eels. The school boy does not 
read—East, West or South—who does not see clearly 
through this diaphanous Tory sham. All men know that 
they are chuckling over their half votes for McKinley, as 
weakening Bryan ; and they know that all men—here at 
home, and abroad—know that they know it. All men 
know that they know—and openly avow—that their phan¬ 
tom candidates are put up, like the patgos of a creole 
picnic, to be shot down. But the pole on which they are 
stuffed and tied flies the republican flag! 

The Tories do not believe that Palmer and Buckner, 
so far from carrying one single state, can carry one county, 
or one city, in any state ; save perhaps the new political 
Sodom, Louisville. And thence, the Lot’s wife of politi¬ 
cal purity has carried her “jewels of silver” to free- 
breathing country Kentucky—never once looking back. 
But even should Louisville give the defunct aliases a 
“complimentary vote;” even though her insulted people, 
and the Confederate tail to the phantom ticket, forget 
that its head there emulated the glory of Butler in New 
Orleans—it will be for naught. The federal “lion” and 
the “rebel lamb” may lie down together, but Mark Ilanna 
shall lead them. They will only leave her a political 
Madeline Pollard. Her Southern sisters will cross to the 
other side; drawing their skirts away from her unsavory 
contact. She will go down to tradition as the only one 
preferring pottage to birthright, boodle to fair fame. 

So, all things considered, the Tory has little the bet¬ 
ter of the Hessian. One sells himself for real solid cash 
in hand. The other thrusts his own ostrich head into the 
burning brush and gets—the smell of singed feathers ! 


TORIES AND HESSIANS. 


85 


No democrat denies any man, anywhere, the full right 
to vote any ticket he pleases, and which represents his 
honest convictions of political duty. Mr. Bryan has voiced 
the feeling of the party, when he said that he wished no 
man’s vote, given under protest that the party, whose 
standard he bears so bravely, is wrong. But what the 
democracy maintains, and will insist upon, is that no man 
who does not vote the ticket of the democratic convention 
shall claim to be “ a democrat,” and borrow the draggled 
plume of David Bennett Hill. It will not do for him to 
dodge behind the flippant assertion that “the party has 
gone away from him.” lie will be called to prove that a 
truth. Failing such proof, he stands a deserter from it; 
and he cannot remain under its Hag and fire upon its 
ranks. He must be democrat, or a Tory. The choice is 
free and open ; but he cannot wear the democratic uni¬ 
form, and answer fo its roll-call, while he trains in the 
dark with the republican awkward squad. 

And Mark Hanna and liis big boodlers have grown 
restive, under realization of their own procured boomerang. 
Wall street kicks. It says in effect: We have put up and 
shut up. Here are a lot of dead respectabilities, who will 
make dough of our costly cake. Let them get out! 

And those “most respectable ” emissaries from the 
Southern Tories who waited, hat in Inind, on Mark Hanna, 
will come back with nothing else in hand. When asked 
their tale of woe, they may condense the reply of the 
greasy Boss into: 

“I give thee sixpence? I will see thee d—d first!” 

Ifut, whatever the outcome, Tory and Hessian alike 
have made their alliance with the East, and against the 
West. The latter gets his pay direct from Wall street; 
or from London, via that accustomed route. His itching 
palm is soothed by the pudgy touch of McKinley’s Boss. 
He is worthy of his hire, for he labors as bidden. But the 
Hessian-in-chief must cease railing at “ the unreconciled 
slave owners of the South.” All the irreconcilables there 
—“ not one of whom ever held an office, or wanted one 


86 


W£JST AND SOUTH. 


are now on his side. They have made their bed, and must 
lie in it; however unpleasant fellows the money changers 
and the negro electors may prove. 

Tog^ether and hand-in-hand, the Tories and the Hes¬ 
sians are striving to do for the South, in 1890, what the 
scalawags and carpetbaggers did for her, in 18H(1 But 
what alliance is existent and visible is distinctly an alli¬ 
ance of East and South, against the West. Together, 
these unnatural allies band against the outspoken will of 
all the people of all the sections ! 

Mark Hanna sets his face as a Hint even towards the 
republican white man in the South. Possibility Tom 
Heed emerges from a thick silence that may be felt, to 
say that Sambo must be preserved, if the ballot fall ! And 
yet, Southern allies of the money changers liddle on one 
string—with the scent of their burning Rome wafting on 
the North breeze—to the one theme that the Western 
Carthage must be destroyed ! 

They howl at “anarchists” and prate of “Altgeldism.” 
Wliat anarchy may come will be of their making. The 
governor of Illinois is well able to take care of himself: 
he is doing it actively at this moment—even while he cares 
for the democratic party. But the Tory and the Hessian 
may both recall other governors—not always in the West— 
who have pardoned convicts for crimes not mentionable 
here, and have done it for political gain, solely. And 
if Altgeld’s “anarchism” is based upon the protection of 
the rights of his state from unasked federal intervention, 
then is every Tory who sympathized with the Southern 
Confederacy—an older anarchist, if not a better. 

These Tories could not vote for a Western man, who 
would not vote for a gold mono-maniac, spite of his own 
honest conviction and the loudly expressed will of his 
entire section. But they can vote for a Western dummy 
—stuffed with golden straw and set up by the East—to 
rivet the protection collar tight about the throat of West¬ 
ern production ; to fasten Eastern gyves upon their own 
wrists, in certain money stricture and probable force bills! 

Which is the nearer “lily white,” the Hessian, or the 
Tory ■? Is the “alliance” with the West, or the East ? 


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